Call: Situational awareness systems to support civil protection preparation and operational decision making

• Health, demographic change and wellbeing;
• Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research, and the Bioeconomy;
• Secure, clean and efficient energy;
• Smart, green and integrated transport;
• Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials;
• Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies;
• Secure societies - protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens.

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models

A major difficulty for civil protection actors to take proper, coordinated decisions for efficient actions (in relation with prevention, preparedness, surveillance, and in particular: response in times of crisis) results from insufficient situational awareness. This is even truer in the context of the EU Civil Protection mechanism: reinforced cooperation across borders calls for improved cross-border situational awareness.

Technologies close to maturity and prototype tools exist, including some issued from previous FP7 R&D projects, that gather or provide data and information from a wide variety of sources useful to improve situational awareness in time of crisis. But no system that satisfactorily integrates these technologies and tools, and fuses these data and information, is available yet. Additionally, there is a theoretical framework which should be focused to understand the psychological, cultural, language and societal dimension of situational awareness in order to prevent, prepare and manage crisis situations.

At least one legal entity established in an EU Member State or Horizon 2020 associated country.

Indicative budget: The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of 1.5 million € would allow for this topic to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Funding rate: 100%.