Summary

Disaster risk reduction policies and institutional mechanism exist at various degrees of completeness in the African countries part of the consortium. Their effectiveness is however limited when having to deal with major disasters and complex emergencies. Risk management is often limited to specific hazard monitoring with limited or no consideration of the vulnerability of the area at risk neither to the systemic nature and possible domino effect between risks of different nature. It is the vulnerability of the population and of the infrastructure at risk that may transform a hazard into a major disaster.

The purpose of the project is to build a reference platform suitable for the management of natural and environmental risks in Africa. The platform must allow the stakeholders in risks management to develop and use tailored risk management models; therefore, the platform will provide similar facilities as WIN, ORCHESTRA, SSE, SANY and U-2010 solutions and should make it easy to build a multi-risks management, i.e. the platform will exploit the commonalities of the information sources and take into account the interdependencies between different hazards. The platform will feature two major technical components:

• an environment for providing services of all kinds related to the acquisition, processing, dissemination of information and an efficient storage of all relevant information so that the stakeholders can analyse afterwards the sequence of events and adapt operational procedures consequently,
• and a multi-purpose solution for the communications (sensor networks, remote sensed data transfer, service access, alert, emergency communications) based on IPv6 either to federate legacy communications or to provide native IPv6 solutions.

The project intends to deliver a pre-operational open platform, assessed by end-users through operational scenarios serving as reference for future larger scale deployment and providing the facilities for prototyping risk management systems and for supporting a rapid development of applications services. This platform will be populated with specific applications (Bushfire, Flood, Desertification and urban risks like Pollution).

→ http://www.irma.lu

Partners

	Université du Luxembourg Luxembourg
	Centre de Communications du Gouvernement Luxembourg
	Spacebel S.A. Belgium
	Thales Alenia Space France
	SES GLOBAL
	Cisco Systems International B.V. Netherlands
	Réseau national de télécommunications pour la technologie, l'enseignement et la recherche France
	Tilburg University Netherlands
	Council for Scientific and Industrial Research South Africa
	Centre de Suivi Écologique Senegal
	Centre Royal de Télédétection Spatiale Morocco
	Institut National des Postes et Télécommunications Morocco
	École nationale supérieure polytechnique de Yaoundé Cameroon
	ICT Policy Implementation Technical Unit, Mozambique Mozambique

Flood, South Africa

Progress

Fields of action

This project covers the following domains:

• Disasters
• Environment
• ICT

Funding

This project is co-funded by European Commission.

TSF role

TSF will pragmatically ensure the technical support in the field in order to solve these crucial issues.

TSF will help the local African partners of the IRMA Project to operate the tests on the field.

As a non-profit organization, TSF can certainly do it much more easily than the commercial companies involved in the consortium.

Moreover TSF will be concerned by the field feedbacks in order to push the consortium to stay as concrete as possible in the robustness of the proposed solutions.