About ENGAGE

The actual global scenario is increasingly exposing the human society to higher hazards, requiring that all individuals specifically and the civil society at large, acquire the ability to rapidly respond to natural disaster and to man-made risks. Risk awareness is indeed a strong priority for modern societies and social resilience is necessary to enhance successful responses to unexpected emergencies.
In the actual strategies there is a gap between the formal effort of public authorities to protect citizens from harm and the voluntary support provided by citizens during emergencies.

Starting from this awareness ENGAGE addresses the whole society and tries to bridge the different ways of intervention to make communities more skilled in responding to disasters jointly and therefore more resilient.

How

We analyze past natural emergencies, terrorist attacks, and man-made disasters to understand how citizens supported formal intervention practices during emergencies under specific contextual conditions.

Together with real practitioners from our Knowledge and Innovation Community of Practice (KI-CoP), we propose emergency response strategies to bring the population closer to rescuers and authorities, bridging the gap between formal and informal guidelines in specific contexts.

We validate our solutions with real users ensuring that they can be transferable to different contexts and can produce actionable knowledge and validated risk management guidelines.

Impact

The long-term vision of the ENGAGE project is to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Developments Goals (SDG) with particular effect on the objective eleven: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Also, the solutions proposed by ENGAGE contributes to the SENDAI Framework for Disaster and Risk Reduction, managing to establish a broader, people-centric approach to disaster risk.

Knowledge and Innovation Community of Practice (KI-CoP)

One of the key components of the ENGAGE Project’s methodology is the participatory collaboration with real emergency workers from the fields of safety and risk management.



The KI-CoP is an open association including practitioners, NGOs, Virtual Operations Support Teams, researchers scientists, and citizens’ representatives supporting ENGAGE as users and co-owners of its solutions.



To learn more about our KI-CoP and its composition, visit the dedicated page.

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Consortium

The project consortium is composed of 14 partners from 8 countries and includes representatives of first responders, civil society organizations, NGOs, citizens representatives and organizations with both practical and scientific knowledge regarding societal resilience.

Sister Projects

ENGAGE is part of a research project with other four similar projects. Under different perspective they share the common purpose of building resilient cities and societies.