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Horizon-2020 "ANYWHERE"

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Stormy skies over Lake Geneva and the Montreux region (Photo: © 2015 Martin Beniston).

The ANYWHERE Project (EnhANcing emergencY management and response to extreme WeatHER and climate Events) was accepted for funding by the European Commission in January 2016. The project is coordinated by the Polytechnic University of Catalunya (UPC; Barcelona) with a budget of over 12 million Euros. As a partner to ANYWHERE, the Climatic Change/Climate Impacts research group at the University of Geneva will receive close to 1 million Euros through to mid-2019.

The principal objective of ANYWHERE is to enable society as a whole and the main civil protection agencies to respond more rapidly than today to extreme climate and weather events, and to better cope with the high social, environmental and economic impacts related to these extremes. The Project will establish a pan-European platform on extreme climate risks that will enable to identify, in a number of geographic regions, critical situations that could lead to loss of life and economic damages. Such early-warning should enable to improve protection measures and, in case of catastrophic situations, ameliorate the coordination of rescue operations. The platform will therefore serve as decision-making tool for various authorities when faced with a situation of crisis, and will provide state-of-the-art early warning systems to help exposed populations avert disaster.

The ANYWHERE consortium is made up of experts from numerous backgrounds (climate, weather forecasting, impacts assessments, etc.), some of whom have already coordinated EU projects in the past. This is the case, for example, for the Climatic Change/Climate Impacts research group at the University of Geneva which coordinated the ACQWA project from 2008-2014 under the 7th EU Framework Program (FP7). In addition to researchers, stakeholders such as civil protection agencies and private-sector SMEs and large firms such as Airbus Industrie are part of the consortium.

 

More news will become available when the project begins later this year, probably in late spring or early summer 2016.