Linking the actors and policies throughout the disaster management cycle by "Agreement on Objectives" – a new output-oriented management approach

Current management of disaster risks is often fragmented due to a lack of coordination between involved actors, i.e. civil protection and spatial planning – a phenomenon which is known as the "problem of interplay". This paper presents an output-oriented risk management approach ("parametric governance"). Here, the modality of the achievement of objectives remains in the hands of the given addressees. This implies a shift from a top-down to a more collaborative, process-oriented form of decision-making. The approach has been successfully applied in two hazard cases and three administrative contexts: (a) the City of Dortmund (Germany) facing flash floods, (b) East Attica region (Greece) facing forest fires, and (c) Lazio Region (Italy) also facing forest fires. As proved by the applications of the concept, a dialogue among experts, stakeholders, and decision-makers is indispensable in order to guarantee inclusion of all diverse and competing values, opinions, and claims. Moreover, a structured communication path is needed to meet the requirements of a risk governance process. Finally, a win-win-situation among the involved actors has to be created to reach an agreement on common goals and actions to achieve them in due time

Methodological framework for an integrated multi-scale vulnerability and resilience assessment

The deliverable illustrates the methodological framework to assess vulnerability and resilience across different temporal and spatial scales, acknowledging the different domains where the latter may manifest, and in particular in the natural and the built environment, allocating a large importance to the so called “critical infrastructures”, in social and economic systems. A set of four matrices has been developed to identify what aspects should be looked at before the impact, that is to say what shows the potential ability or inability to cope with an extreme; at the impact, addressing in particular the capacity (or incapacity) to sustain various types of stresses (in the form of acceleration, pressure, heat…); in the time immediately after the impact, as the ability (or inability) to suffer losses and still continue functioning; and in the longer term of recovery, as the capacity to find a new state of equilibrium in which the fragilities manifested during and after the impact are addressed. Developing the framework, a particular attention has been paid to the relationships among systems within the same matrix and among matrices, across spatial and temporal scales. A set of matrices has been developed for different natural hazards, including in particular landslides and floods, trying to include as much as possible what past cases, the international literature and prior experience of involved partners have indicated as relevant parameters and factors to look at. In this regard, the project builds on the state of the art, embedding what has been learned until now in terms of response capacity to a variety of stresses and in the meantime identifying gaps to be addressed by future research

Recurrent governance challenges in the implementation and alignment of flood risk management strategies: a review

In Europe increasing flood risks challenge societies to diversify their Flood Risk Management Strategies (FRMSs). Such a diversification implies that actors not only focus on flood defence, but also and simultaneously on flood risk prevention, mitigation, preparation and recovery. There is much literature on the implementation of specific strategies and measures as well as on flood risk governance more generally. What is lacking, though, is a clear overview of the complex set of governance challenges which may result from a diversification and alignment of FRM strategies. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap. It elaborates on potential processes and mechanisms for coordinating the activities and capacities of actors that are involved on different levels and in different sectors of flood risk governance, both concerning the implementation of individual strategies and the coordination of the overall set of strategies. It identifies eight overall coordination mechanisms that have proven to be useful in this respect

SL-ReDu: Greek sign language recognition for educational applications. Project description and early results

We present SL-ReDu, a recently commenced innovative project that aims to exploit deep-learning progress to advance the state-of-the-art in video-based automatic recognition of Greek Sign Language (GSL), while focusing on the use-case of GSL education as a second language. We first briefly overview the project goals, focal areas, and timeline. We then present our initial deep learning-based approach for GSL recognition that employs efficient visual tracking of the signer hands, convolutional neural networks for feature extraction, and attention-based encoder-decoder sequence modeling for sign prediction. Finally, we report experimental results for small-vocabulary, isolated GSL recognition on the single-signer "Polytropon" corpus. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first application of deep-learning techniques to GSL. © 2020 ACM