ENGAGE - Engage Society for Risk Awareness and Resilience
ENGAGE brings together 15 partners from 9 countries in order to provide novel knowledge and identify impactful solutions to exploit Europe's societal resilience. Ultimately, the work of ENGAGE seeks to establish a broader, citizen-centered approach to disaster risk.
Description
The project consortium is composed of 15 partners from 9 countries and includes representatives of first responders, civil society organizations, NGOs, citizens representatives and organizations with both practical and scientific knowledge regarding societal resilience.
Through the ENGAGE project, past natural emergencies, terrorist attacks, and man-made disasters are analyzed to understand how citizens supported formal intervention practices during emergencies under specific contextual conditions.
Together with real practitioners from the Knowledge and Innovation Community of Practice (KI-CoP), the ENGAGE project proposes emergency response strategies to bring the population closer to rescuers and authorities, bridging the gap between formal and informal guidelines in specific contexts.
The ENGAGE consortium validates solutions with real users ensuring that they can be transferable to different contexts and can produce actionable knowledge and validated risk management guidelines.
Did the Sendai Framework change or contribute to changes in your activities/organization? If so, how?
The solutions proposed by ENGAGE contributes to the Sendai Framework for Disaster and Risk Reduction, managing to establish a broader, people-centric approach to disaster risk.
The policy recommendations we've crafted were also shaped by the priorities outlined in the Sendai Framework. These recommendations propose and advocate for the creation of new ecosystems where spontaneous volunteers can actively participate across all stages of disaster management. Moreover, they advocate for enhancing the environment in which crisis communications takes place in order to better consider citizens' needs.
What led you to make this commitment/initiative?
What was your position before making this Voluntary Commitment / prior to the Sendai Framework?
The actual global scenario is increasingly exposing the human society to higher hazards, requiring that all individuals specifically and the civil society at large, acquire the ability to rapidly respond to natural disaster and to man-made risks. Risk awareness and social resilience is necessary to ensure proper response to unexpected emergencies.
In the actual strategies, there is a gap between the formal effort of public authorities to protect citizens from harm and the voluntary support provided by citizens during emergencies.
Starting from this awareness ENGAGE addresses the whole society and tries to bridge the different ways of intervention to make communities more skilled in responding to disasters jointly and therefore more resilient.
