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EU RISC-KIT

EU RISC-KIT [Resilience-Increasing Strategies for Coasts – toolKIT] is a major EU-funded research project which will deliver ready-to-use methods, tools and management approaches to reduce risk and increase resilience to low-frequency, high-impact hydro-meteorological events on European coasts. The project, which has 18 partner organisations across Europe, is coordinated from Delft, The Netherlands by the water engineering and water management consultancy Deltares; it will run from 1 November 2013 for 42 months.

The open-source and free-ware RISC-KIT tool kit will consist of:

  • a Coastal Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) which – at the regional scale (100’s km) – can quickly assess present and future hot spot areas of coastal risk due to multi-hazards;
  • a quantitative, high-resolution Early Warning System (EWS) and Decision Support System (DSS) for use on these hot spots (with a scale of 10’s of km);
  • a web-based management guide offering innovative, cost-effective, ecosystem-based Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) measures; and
  • a Coastal Risk Database of present and historic socio-economic and physical data.

The toolkit will be tested using data collected on ten diverse case study sites along each of Europe’s regional seas and one international site. The toolkit’s performance will be evaluated with an End-User Board of coastal managers, civil protection agencies and local governments with a vested interest in each of these case study sites.

In Cambridge, the project will, firstly, review current-practice coastal risk management plans, at both national and at the UK North Norfolk case study site scales; collect regional-scale socio-economic, cultural and physical data through end-users and stakeholders consultations; and help with the development of a WEB-GIS impact-oriented database for the case study site. Secondly, the project will develop a library of coastal vulnerability indicators, with particular emphasis on coastal ecosystem indicators, and assist with the assessment of southern North Sea hazards; together these tasks will define the Coastal Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) for the North Norfolk coast. Thirdly, the research will help identify and develop disaster risk reduction (prevention, mitigation and preparedness actions) and coastal resilience measures, which will be both coherent at national policy level and locally appropriate. In the second phase of the project, Cambridge will assist with modelling activities and scenario testing.

Figure 1: Conceptual drawing of the RISC-KIT CRAF (top panel), the EWS (middle panel) and the DSS (bottom panel)

RISC-KIT