Managing the systemic risks of multi-hazards with the support of disaster risk assessment tools co-developed with and for stakeholders

PARATUS Project aims to address the issue of limited and inaccessible loss assessment tools for first and second responders and local authorities. Existing tools operate with complex data sets that are difficult to obtain in time- sensitive decision-making situations. PARATUS project co-developed various tools together with stakeholders in the interactive workshops in four main case
study areas, i.e. an impact chain builder, where users can develop their impact chain of past events, or scenarios for possible future disaster events, which is used as a basis for quantifying direct damage and prioritizing secondary losses in different sectors; the FastHazard tool which provides fast estimations of multiple hazards and can be used as basis for risk reduction planning; the RiskChanges tool for the quantification of losses; serious games for training with the other simulation tools. We are still working on various other tools, i.e. a resilience indicator tool, a tool for developing future scenarios and risk reduction alternatives, an impact-based forecasting tool and a tool for collaborative planning. We host these tools in the Disaster Risk Stakeholder (DRS) Hub, a co-developed web-based simulation and information service for first and second responders and other stakeholders to evaluate the impact chains of multi-hazard events, with particular emphasis on cascading impacts. This presentation provides an overview of the PARATUS project and the disaster risk stakeholder hub.

The DRS-Hub has two major blocks: an information service that provides static information (regularly updated) and a simulation service, which is a dynamic component where stakeholders can interactively work with the tools in the platform. The information service contains components like: terminology WIKI, links to other platforms developed by EU Horizon Europe projects with similar objectives; the standardized impact chains for a number of historical disasters, and which can be queried by users on several aspects; a module linking to hazard and exposure datasets and modelling results; a tool guiding users to various resources on risk reduction measures, good examples. The simulation service contains a series of tools that the users can use to develop new hazard and risk information for their area, develop multi-hazard risk scenarios, and test risk reduction alternatives. The exact number of components and the final structure of the platform will be determined iteratively through a series of stakeholder consultations, following a user-centred design. The platform has been designed in a flexible way with the collaboration of more than 25 EU-funded projects to be able to cater for stakeholders that work in different sectors, geographic settings, interacting hazards, and at the same time to address their needs for analysing the impact of compounding and multi-hazard events, with cascading impacts.