READ Project (2014-2017)

READ is a research project, funded under the Prevention, Preparedness and Consequence Management of Terrorism and other Security-Related Risks Programme (CIPS) Action Programme (European Commission – Directorate-General Home Affairs). The project aims at improving resilience capacities required to manage Critical Infrastructure (CI) disruptions and enhancing current emergency management practices to better address the challenges raised by cross border CI disruptions.

The overall objective of READ is to support the improvement of European emergency management practices by integrating issues related to trans-boundary critical infrastructures disruptions and related cascading effects into the current emergency management set-up. This objective will be achieved by providing adequate knowledge, tools and related strategies to prepare for, cope with and recover from cross-border crisis situations resulting from the interruption of essential services supply.

A key part of the READ project is development of a conceptual and methodological framework to maintain resilience capabilities for coping with trans-boundary CI disruptions. The approach to be developed should integrate the resilience capabilities of CIs into the Emergency Management (EM) cycle, which would allow emergency services to explicitly address resilience improvement measures while planning to cope with CI disruptions.  The framework shall have a sound theoretical foundation as well as practical relevance for, in particular, developing assessment and training tools for CI stakeholders. Following this limited scope of the project, the framework is by choice focused primarily on the response and early recovery phases of CI interruptions and to a lesser extent on the wider tasks of preparation (including contingency plans) and long-term recovery and possible adaptation to novel and possibly very different circumstances of service.

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Visit READ Project website