Conference for forward thinking in crisis management 

Crisis management professionals are invited to attend a unique international emergency management conference to be held at the Bluepoint Conference Centre in Brussels, Belgium on February 19-20, 2020. And it's free to attend! Stephen Prendergast from the DRIVER+ project outlines the details.

_{The Bluepoint Conference Centre, the venue for the DRIVER+ Advanced Crisis Management Conference being held in Brussels on 19-20 February, 2020. Photo: DRIVER+}

The DRIVER+ Advanced Crisis Management Conference is the culmination of several years’ work involving trials, demonstrations, technology assessments and research to accelerate innovation in crisis management throughout Europe, particularly in connection with climate change-related events such as wildfires and flooding.

The conference will provide a unique overview of how crisis management organisations can use the project’s outputs to select and evaluate solutions addressing identified crisis management gaps on a thorough, methodological basis. It will constitute an invaluable opportunity to access cutting-edge research, trial feedback and technological solutions, with assessment insights from leading researchers and practitioners.

DRIVER+ is an EU funded project tasked with promoting and testing new, science-based improvements in crisis management, to improve response to climate change-related threats, as well as other threats such as industrial accidents and terrorism.

In a series of keynotes, plenaries and specialist demonstrations, participants will learn about, and experience actively, the work and lessons learned of the DRIVER+ project teams:

• the development of a scientifically based trial methodology, the DRIVER+ trial guidance methodology (TGM) for conducting trials of crisis management solutions and the test-bed technical infrastructure (TTI) that underpins it; and
• reports on the large-scale Trials based on the TGM and TTI conducted in Poland, France, The Netherlands and Austria set up to assess technological and other crisis management solutions in realistic scenarios.

There will also be presentations on:

• the establishment of an open, cooperative information-sharing network, the Crisis Management Innovation Network Europe (CMINE);
• the DRIVER+ Portfolio of Solutions – an online database of crisis management technologies; and
• the establishment of a network of DRIVER+ Centres of Expertise to ensure the sustainability of project outputs.

Attendees will also have access to a solutions marketplace of technologies and tools tested at DRIVER+ Trials.

To register, please go to the ‘Final Conference’ section of the DRIVER+ website here

Image: Bruce Rolff|123rf