The overall objective of IncREO is to provide actors responsible for disaster management, risk prevention, civil protection and also spatial planning with EO-based solutions contributing particularly to an improved preparedness and mitigation planning for areas highly vulnerable to natural disasters and already noticeable climate change trends. These solutions will be adjusted to the users’ and end-users’ needs and will also reflect on short-term climate change scenarios and related legislature – at the national, supranational and European level. As a multi-risk oriented concept, “per se” all types of natural disasters are addressed. However, selected use cases (dam failure, storm surge and wave height, flood, earthquake and landslide) and the transfer of solutions to a specifically multi-risk prone test site will also be covered. From a technical point of view, the IncREO solutions will be based on state-of-the-art methodologies, implemented by means of up-to-date mapping and modelling/procedures and, finally, appropriately disseminated to the relevant stakeholder groups.
The UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, Venice (Italy), will support public awareness in natural risk-preparedness, in particular floods and geo-hazards. The UNESCO Venice Office will be responsible for the interface of the scientific partners of the project with the end-users community; in particular, the Civil Protection Department of the Veneto Region – according to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for co-operation activities signed, and the Albanian Ministry of Interior Affairs (Civil Protection Department) as project demonstrators. The Office will provide its consortiated partners with an unprecedented highly-defined satellite-based map to improve the identification capacity of territorial vulnerabilities in order to increase the resilience of communities and nations to natural disasters.
Besides UNESCO, the official partners of IncREO are: Spot Image S.A. SISA (France), Geomer GmbH. (Germany), GeoVille Informationssysteme und Datenverarbeitung GmbH. (Austria); University of Twente (Netherlands), National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology NIMH of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences BAS (Bulgaria); Météo-France (France); Romanian Space Agency ROSA (Romania); and, Infoterra GmbH Ltd (Germany).