The European Commission financed with more than 5 Millions of euros the project named RESILOC (Resilient Europe and Societies by Innovating Local Communities) in the context of the research program Horizon 2020.

RESILOC is coordinated by the Research Institute of Fraunhofer.The Sicilian Department of Civil Protection, the City of Catania and IES Solutions (technical coordinator) are partners of the project, playing fundamental roles to pave the way for both technical and social innovation processes related to Civil Protection. Project’s results will be demonstrated in Sicily, Norway, Croatia, Greece and Bulgaria.

The numerous catastrophic events causing victims and damages are certainly a cause of great concern and have attracted a lot of attention by the Authorities in charge.
In addition to the immediate consequences of earthquakes, floods, fires, volcanic eruptions, landslides and industrial accidents, we need to take into account the impact of the amount of time needed for communities to recover their citizen’s routines and production activities.

In this direction, RESILOC finds a perfect placement in Sicily, due to its environmental uniqueness in Europe as a territory being constantly at risk, because of its fragility, the presence of well-known environmental risks and high-impact industrial settlements.

On the other hand, the Sicilian Region has always been a research and innovation laboratory, with continuous efforts to:

• strengthen its organizational structure with new technologies;
• involve citizens in reporting dangerous conditions and handle them properly;
• educate the population to adopt the right behavior in the event of emergency situations;
• increase efficiency and coordination of rescuers and volunteers.

In recent years the general guidelines have evolved towards a concept of Resilience that identifies actions with wider criteria, which are useful to make our communities more robust, able to absorb the consequences of a calamitous event and to resume normal activities in the shortest time. Regarding this, many organizational efforts have been made by the local institutions on different levels, Local and Regional, directed towards the promotion of new organizational and participants activities, also involving the adoption of new technologies.

The JIXEL platform, developed by IES Solutions, will be enriched with new features that will be developed within RESILOC. Such new features will allow the adoption of JIXEL as a tool for evaluating the local resilience, taking into account both the objective parameters of which it is composed (dangerousness, exposed value, vulnerability) and less tangible aspects related to the behavior of people.

The funding will be used to analyze the need for improvements in terms of robustness of the local communities to calamitous events, as well as to define models, procedures and solutions that, once applied and demonstrated, will become patrimony of the whole of Europe.

RESILOC has started the 1st of June 2019, its duration is set at 36 months of work and will therefore end in 2022.
Sito Web: https://www.resilocproject.eu