Many of the lessons that we have learnt through direct engagement with the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) community are linked to the fact that the European market is fragmented and complicated. The CBRN community faces many challenges to improve its resilience to new attacks and threats. It spans issues from increased globalisation and security threats that are growing in scale and sophistication through to issues of increased risks of incidents caused by malicious action or climatic events. Conditions and the threat sophistication are constantly evolving, and multi-stakeholder crisis response is always necessary.
Yet, for those involved in the response process, standardisation is not necessarily looked on in a very favorable light, a lesson learnt from the ENCIRCLE project. The need to transfer research and innovation results in a standardised form is of paramount importance, but the community must trust it. This is one of the main challenges that we are facing in STAIR4SECURITY. Community acceptance has been to the forefront of our work. We primarily enable policymakers and people enforcing CBRN and Disaster Risk Resilience (DRR) preparedness and response to address their potential needs in standardisation, research and innovation to support future coordination efforts.
STAIR4SECURITY primarily comprises of a practitioner and business- orientated platform and a supporting e-learning tool. Collectively, they enable users to build a forward-looking picture to better support practitioner needs related to CBRN/DRR topics and to help with the engagement process, standards and best practices with relevant partners. The platform is designed to enable results from related projects to be populated onto the platform. It allows users to network and to contribute to the platform resources and services. The e-learning tool supports users to maximise their usage of the platform and to strengthen their knowledge and know-how about CBRN and standardisation.
We don’t work in silo mode! That is important to how we address the challenge. Underlining the project efforts is a 3-phased communication approach that is highly focused on engagement and impact to ensure that we meet the target community needs. We listen, learn, apply, evaluate and listen again. Engagement with policymakers and people enforcing CBRNe/DRR preparedness and response is the focal point of STAIR4SECURITY. The identification of potential needs in standardisation, research and innovation to support future coordination efforts is another fundamental aspect of the project. Our engagement approach has been top/down and bottom/up target community-driven. It has included 1-to-1 meetings, presentations, conferences and project workshops as well as the participation at the Community of Users event.
Related projects that STAIR4SECURITY has engaged with includes ENCIRCLE, TERRIFFIC, FIRE-IN, NO-FEAR, INCLUDING and DAREnet to name but a few. We ran a joint-conference with NO-FEAR in Rome, November 2019 and again applied the same cycle of listen and learn. In recent times, we ran a series of Meeting of Minds (MoM) events helped to capture feedback and input for the delivery of the STAIR4SECURITY platform and once again our listen and learn principal is applied.
With vigour, we will continue our pursuit to deliver the STAIR4SECURITY platform and e-learning tool that meets the specific needs of the CBRN and DRR communities.
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