ESPREssO aims at contributing to a new strategic vision to approach natural risk reduction and climate change adaptation, thereby opening new frontiers for research and policy making. From this perspective it wants also to be of support to the EC research and development and to the JRC Knowledge Centre on Disaster Risk Management. To achieve this goal, the project structure is built upon the central role of three main challenges to be addressed in order to propose ways to mitigate differences, to identify gaps, and to overcome the boundaries among different topics: 1 To propose ways to create more coherent national and European approaches on Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and resilience strengthening; 2.To enhance risk management capabilities by bridging the gap between science and legal/policy issues at local and national levels in six European countries; 3.To address the issue of efficient management of trans-boundary crises. Activities on the three ESPREssO challenges will be performed in all work-packages. The first 3 WPs are essentially dedicated to collection of information: on relevant stakeholders’ needs, perspectives and priorities (WP1), on the existing knowledge of legal, policy and science approach at the EU level and across identified countries (WP2), and development of hazard-specific scenarios as a basis for a Risk Management Simulation tool to elicit stakeholders (WP3). The other two WPs are dedicated to the analysis of information and the preparation of proposals: analysis of information and evaluation of the proposed strategies (WP4), and preparation and dissemination of guidelines (WP5). A comprehensive approach to the ESPREssO challenges requires a strong, multi-disciplinary group. The ESPREssO team is consequently formed by partners having a well-known expertise in legal and governance issues and natural risk management, socio-economic aspects and resilience, hard science, statistical approaches to multi-risk and resilience.

The objective of SHEER is to develop best practices for assessing and mitigating the environmental footprint of shale gas exploration and exploitation. The consortium includes partners from Italy, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, USA. It will develop a probabilistic procedure for assessing short and long-term risks associated with groundwater contamination, air pollution and induced seismicity. The severity of each of these depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the fracking processes and may become pathway for gas and fluid migration towards underground water reservoirs or the surface. An important part of SHEER will be devoted to monitor and understand how far this enhanced permeability pattern will develop both in space and time. These hazard may be at least partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they will be approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. SHEER will develop methodologies and procedures to track and model fracture evolution around shale gas exploitation sites and a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas. The developed methodologies will be applied and tested on a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity, changes of the quality of ground-waters and air, ground deformations, and operational data collected from past case studies. They will be improved by the high quality data SHEER will collect monitoring micro-seismicity, air and groundwater quality and ground deformation in a planned hydraulic fracturing to be carried out by the Polish Oil and Gas Company in Pomerania. Best practices to be applied in Europe to monitor and minimize any environmental impacts will be worked out with the involvement of an advisory group including governmental decisional bodies and private industries.