Innovation for crisis management: sharing ideas on shared ideas?

A two-day international workshop on Innovation for Crisis Management (#I4CM for tweetofiles) organised by the DRIVER Demonstration Project was held in Marseille, France, on 26-27 May. I had the pleasure to participate.

The workshop brought together a wide range of stakeholders including practitioners, business representatives, public authorities, scientists and project managers from across Europe and the Euro-Mediterranean region. Innovation in crisis management was discussed from a number of angles: as a necessary dimension for crisis preparedness and response; as a means to address the human and behavioural aspects of crisis management; as the output of better coordinated, disseminated and used research results. Organisations such as the European Commission (ECHO, HOME, JRC), FRONTEX and other regional and local authorities also contributed to these discussions, and also had a chance to showcase some of their own innovative tools and processes – such as this platform – in their respective fields of activity.

I thought interesting to relay here a couple of discussions held during this workshop:

Concrete examples of take-up of Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS) for emergency response were presented, such as for the management of forest fires in the South of France. Great enthusiasm for this technology, its many cost-benefit and practical advantages, was shared by practitioners, scientists and authorities alike, although the many legal and financial constraints remain important hurdles. Increasing research is being carried out in this sector, more affordable products are reaching the market, but can the legal challenges be easily overcome in the foreseeable future?

Social media and social networks also triggered a number of discussions, with stakeholders from all sectors – business, practitioners, local authorities – discussing their use to communicate risks, warn and facilitate response operations. Various new 'apps' to interact with citizens and their take-up at local level were used as illustrations. Interestingly, warning lights were raised by operational managers of the risk of over- and mismanaged-use of social media: could replacing hard evidence with filtered information from social networks have an impact on relaying accurate evidence up the chain of command? How should this new wave of information be managed to ensure and strengthen the evidence base for operational decision-making, and avoid affecting it?

One thing is sure: ambitions, hopes and challenges of the civil protection community present at the workshop are not too far away from those of the humanitarian sector, to say the least. An opportunity worth taking? My personal opinion is: why not.