Knowledge Exchange Platform for Co-creating Resilience against Disasters

Demand: Due to tighter interdependencies of natural and sociotechnical systems, disasters strike with higher force and impact, thus urging a societal demand for more effective measures for disaster risk reduction. Crucially, most disaster resilience approaches lack an inclusion of the first-hand experiences of local people. Hence, to establish a new level of resilience beyond technical measures, the knowledge of affected citizens needs to be tapped as the main source of information and problem-solving. Ambition: To raise disaster resilience and preparedness in European cities and societies, the project KEEP_R will create a novel Knowledge Exchange Platform that purposefully collects and manages the knowledge from citizens in disaster-prone areas, helps authorities and first responders to identify existing deficits in the disaster management life cycle and enables the creation of new strategies. The key idea of KEEP_R is to synergize locally existing disaster measures with international best practices. Utilizing the novel approach of a “Pattern Language” for the description of disasters, it not only prepares a more holistic understanding of disasters, but also prepares for emerging and unpredictable disasters, and helps to invent responses against them. Output: Technological key output of KEEP_R will be a digital open-source platform designed for cross-border exchange and collaboration. Equipped with interactive analytics, search and matching functionalities, it is conceived around a comprehensive inventory of best practices and successful approaches, surveyed in disaster-experienced countries such as Italy, Greece, or Japan. With this knowledge base, it will be able to compare and match specific disaster scenarios with existing best practices, and derive response strategies. In the pilot applications, it will harvest relevant disaster experiences online, and complement these surveys with co-creative workshops, involving first responders, authorities, and citizens.