ENHANCE publishes its final book on multi-sector partnerships

On 31 October 2016 the ENHANCE project announced its final book, titled “Novel Multi-Sector Partnerships in Disaster Risk Management: Results of the ENHANCE project”. Ralph Lasage served as the project manager at the time. The book closed a research effort that had started in 2012 with 24 partners from 11 European countries and ten case studies, which ran from alpine hazards on railway lines to volcanic ash and its effect on aviation.

Two messages carried the announcement. Partnerships between stakeholders were presented as central to effective risk reduction, and so was a broader base of risk information than any single organisation holds. Across the case studies, ten partnerships linking public bodies, private firms and civil society had been set up or developed further, with particular weight on the financial sector.

The announcement named concrete outcomes:

• the Wadden Sea Forum planned to add climate change impacts to its partnership work;
• the Rotterdam Port Authority, the Municipality of Rotterdam and the Dutch infrastructure ministry committed roughly EUR 200,000 to further analysis of climate risk in the port;
• partners from the case studies contributed to the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and to the European Commission’s Green Paper on the insurance of natural and man-made disasters.

The project facts given with the release were precise. The coordinator was based in the Netherlands, the grant agreement number was 308438, total cost came to EUR 7,687,123 and the EU contribution to EUR 5,992,084. The project ran from December 2012 to November 2016. A press release on the same book followed on 10 November 2016 (see the Brussels release), and the Rotterdam work is summarised in the Port of Rotterdam record. The ten case studies are mapped in the case-study atlas.