ANYWHERE

ANYWHERE: An operational decision support system for proactive climate emergencies management.

ANYWHERE is a H2020 innovation action that proposes an operational Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (MH-EWS) for climate emergencies able to translate the most advanced meteorological forecasts into Impact forecasting products (see ANYWHERE Catalogue).

This impact forecasting concept of ANYWHERE is an innovation disruption in the field of Civil Protection and Emergency Management. Thus, AI is used to integrate the hazard forecastings served by the MH-EWS with high resolution local impact models automatically combining them with the regional layers of exposure and vulnerability in the emergency command centres (EMCs). All this information, usually available but not interconnected, is now processed in the multi-risk decision support platform A4EU (ANYWHERE for Europe), to automatically identify the affected critical points, including their characteristics and location, and other advanced services designed to allow the emergency response specialist to focus on local IMPACTS, without the necessity to look into the details of the meteorological forecasts and triggers, selecting the most vulnerable locations (i.e. Schools, Train stations, Hospitals, Seveso facilities, etc.) instead of vast regions, supporting them to magnify their response capabilities.

These systems have been verified, tested and operationally demonstrated in 7 Pilot Sites involving Emergency Management Centres, covering all the climatic range in EU during more than one year, showing excellent results in a number of events, some over 50-year return period. The collected experiences have been presented as success stories in the ANYWHERE final Workshop held in Brussels (October 2019) showing the huge innovative potential of the ANYWHERE real-time implementations.

The success stories have been completed by the operational implementation of the ANYWHERE self-protection and self-awareness tools to trigger automatic warnings to increase the resilience of citizens and communities at risk and activate self-protection plans. They include the A4Campsites, A4Snow, A4Schools and A4Grids as well as the municipal version of the platform, A4Cities, which has been tested in several municipalities.

The most important success of ANYWHERE is to have supported the participant EMCs to move forward towards a “new paradigm”: transforming the emergency response from reactive to proactive (starting before that the emergency occurs) thanks to the ANYWHERE high-resolution impact forecasts integrated in the A4EU platform, which allows a better management of the emergency and a significant reduction of damages. The success achieved is build on the co-creation and co-ownership concept allowing the users’ needs and expertise to guide the entire innovative process, from the design to the implementation and the operation.