A few days ago, one of the most significant known cyber-terrorist attacks to date hit some of the world's major technological and media groups. The fall-out saw citizens unable to access their online services and raised alarm as to whether user data could have landed in the hands of cybercriminals.

A team of researchers at Tecnun, University of Navarra, has been working for on the Smart Mature Resilience project for the last, as the coordinator of a consortium of 13 institutions, universities and experts in resilience.

The objective of this project is to deal with potential crises resulting from climate change, social dynamics, and possible failures or emergencies in critical infrastructure, creating guides European resilience to prevent and deal with the potential consequences of these phenomena.

SMR is currently developing a communication and engagement platform, which is designed to support cities and emergency services in their communication with citizens.

Cities and city administrations are complex systems with existing processes and channels for communicating internally and with their citizens. Rather than proposing to replace or substitute processes already in use and familiar to citizens, SMR will provide a toolkit for cities to be able to 'fill in the blanks' where their current communication channels are lacking facilities.

This will serve as a toolbox, where cities can compare the communication systems already in place in their systems and choose elements and features of the platform to serve their individual contexts. The tool works with real-time concrete data, which can be supplied by different users on different administrative levels, and the platform is designed for ease of use and does not require advanced technical knowledge.

The Smart Mature Resilience project is holding its review workshop in Kristiansand, Norway. The project has had an introduction this morning to the prototype Community Engagement and Communication Tool and with feedback from the project’s Tier 1 cities on their experience so far in the project on stakeholder engagement.

The cities also shared the security sectors they are focusing on as part of the project, their needs from the new communication platform and how it related to the communication systems their cities already have in place. The Community Engagement and Communication Tool will serve as a toolbox, where cities can compare the communication systems already in place in their systems and choose elements and features of the platform to serve their individual contexts. The tool works with real-time concrete data, which can be supplied by different users on different administrative levels, and the platform is designed for ease of use and does not require advanced technical knowledge.

Sigurd Paulsen of the city of Kristiansand, where the workshop takes place, identified water and waste as the security sectors of particular focus, and noted that the city is currently significantly investing in these areas. The city has worked closely with local research partner CIEM to provide comprehensive feedback and information on the city’s current communication practices in order to guide development of the tool and to optimize its potential for practical application. Paulsen noted that SMR workshops and networking have drawn attention to the need to build resilience within municipal administration and has also improved relationships and communication with city stakeholders, as well as spreading knowledge of resilience at national events, reaching national governmental actors. Kristiansand has also been able to closely cooperate with the city of Vejle through the project.

Judith Moreno, Donostia, named cyber security as a sector of particular focus for Donostia. Donostia found valuable networking at project events, as diverse experts from the city met at the SMR kickoff events, who are working on topics related to resilience, including health, food and crisis management, and networking through the SMR project gave these stakeholders the opportunity to discuss their experiences, which are diverse but related. Like Kristiansand, awareness of the need for resilience and the value of resilience-building has been recognised as a high priority on municipal agendas as a result of the project. As a bilingual city, Donostia has come up against the challenge of articulating and communicating resilience issues in translation. Standardization partners DIN were able to offer to support the city in this challenge and confirmed that they have comprehensive experience with addressing this challenge.

Frankie Barrett, Glasgow City Council, noted water security as a focus of Glasgow’s current resilience-building as part of the SMR project. He noted the intersections between physical and social resilience, and the importance of developing resilience against flood risk, as this can put the city’s most vulnerable groups at higher risk as a result of social factors. Glasgow has recently released its own resilience strategy. As a result of the project, Glasgow has been able to more closely communicate with stakeholders who had not previously been reached regarding resilience. Communication and coordination with national governmental level has also been boosted through the SMR project.

The workshop will continue with feedback from the Tier 2 cities.

Smart Mature Resilience project partners met with over 30 local stakeholders, principally from the water sector and emergency services, on 3rd June 2016 to launch the tools testing phase for SMR core city of Glasgow.

Workshop organizers ICLEI Europe supported by the University of Strathclyde, hosts Glasgow City Council, project coordinators TECNUN and standardization partner DIN met with a group of the city’s most crucial stakeholders in ensuring Glasgow’s resilience against flood risk and crisis situations: SEPA, Scottish Water, Fire Scotland, Scottish Ambulance, Police Scotland, New Gorbals Housing Association, Wheatley Group, National Centre for Resilience, the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Cordia and Sustainable Glasgow.

Project partners presented the key concepts of the SMR project and its resilience tools, which the project is co-creating in cooperation with project cities to form a Resilience Management Guideline. The contributions, opinions and experience of local first responders, critical infrastructure institutions and most importantly, Glasgow City Council, are essential to the development of these tools. While the tools are developed by experts with access to the latest scientific research and technology, local stakeholders’ input ensures that the tools are targeted at addressing the most prevalent and pressing issues facing Glasgow and its citizens. In Glasgow’s case, one of the most urgent challenges and top priorities is the risk of flooding.

As part of the workshop, the city, project partners and local stakeholders analysed and defined Glasgow’s key resilience challenges and practices in relation to water and the flooding security sector. In Scotland, flood risk is managed in accordance with the national Flood Risk Management (Scotland) Act 2009, which includes policy specific to the local context as well as creating a joined-up and coordinated process to manage flood risk at a national and local level. The regional Climate Ready Clyde initiative sets out a shared vision for a resilient city region through collaboration between neighbouring local authorities and agencies.

To explore how the city would currently react to a water-related crisis and to gather data for development of the SMR tools, the stakeholders and city partners considered a number of flood scenarios and designed theoretical responses in order to minimize distruption to the city.

Read more about Glasgow

Jose Julio Gonzalez delivered a plenary presentation on the SMR project entitled "Stalking resilience: Making cities vertebrae in society's resilience backbone" as an invited speaker for the first plenary session of the International Joint Conference - CIO-ICIEOM-IISE-AIM (IJC2016). The conference focussed on co-creation, taking as its motto "Building bridges between researchers and practitioners”.

The conference took place at TECNUN-School of Engineering (San Sebastián, Spain) on July 13th-15th, 2016. It aimed to provide a forum to disseminate, to all branches of industry, information on the most recent and relevant research, theories and practices in Industrial Engineering, Management and Operations. The joint conference is a result of an agreement between ADINGOR (Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Ingeniería de Organización), ABEPRO (Associação Brasileira de Engenharia de Produção), AIM (European Academy for Industrial Management) and IISE (Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers), and it will take place at TECNUN-School of Engineering (San Sebastián, Spain) from July 13th-15th, 2016.

The Smart Mature Resilience project partners met in Rome in February 2016 for a workshop on the topic of social problems organised by the University of Strathclyde. The meeting included testing and use of the Group Explorer tool, which has been developed by Strathclyde. In use, the Group Support System allows participants to interact directly with the developing model (shown on a ‘public’ screen) via networked consoles.

The system uses a ‘Transitional Object’, which is a continuously changing causal map on the screen that can be seen by all. It allows anonymity, high levels of productivity, the exploration of consensus and differences of view, and it produces a real-time log of all interactions for exploration off-line.

The meeting was organised by the University of Strathclyde and hosted by the City of Rome. Watch the video about the workshop produced by the City of Rome.

The Smart Mature Resilience project was presented at a number of international conferences in recent months. Iker Zubizarreta, Tecnun, presented the project Euconcip final conference in Brussels from 8-9 June 2016. Click here to download the conference agenda.

The project was further presented at the CIPRNet International Symposium in The University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Click here to download the programme.

Project partners also represented SMR at the 4th Community of Users meeting on Natural Hazards, 22nd June 2016, in Brussels in addition to the other four projects funded under the same call.

The Smart Mature Resilience project meets in Vejle from 9-12 May 2016 to proceed with validation of the tools under development by the project: the maturity model, the systemic risk assessment questionnaire and the engagement tool.

Each of the seven project cities have been able to analyse and assess their resilience engagement and development in relation to the resilience maturity model schema of "S, M, A, R and T". The cities share their experience as part of the Circle of Sharing and Learning as to their progress through the various stages of resilience development by presenting their experiences and best practices in Vejle and also as part of 2-tier webinars.

The Smart Mature Resilience project contributed to the 8th European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns, held from 27-29 April in Bilbao, Spain. The core project city of Donostia/San Sebastián played a prominent role in the conference, which was organised by ICLEI - Local Environments for Sustainability alongside several Basque partners.

Eneko Goia, Mayor of San Sebastián in an interview with media at the conference, emphasised the importance of building the city's resilience, noted the value in the city's participation in the Smart Mature Resilience project as part of this process, while emphasising the effectiveness of cooperating with other cities in Europe to solve common challenges together.

Tecnun and ICLEI presented the project as part of the Innovation Market on the second day of the conference, at which over 800 representatives of local and regional government, European and international institutions, multilateral organisations, members of the research community, business leaders, and civil society participated.

The Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project launched the pilot implementation of its tools in partner city Donostia/San Sebastián, Basque Country (Spain) on 13 April 2016 at a kick-off workshop in the project host institution of Tecnun, University of Navarra. According to Diario de Noticias de Gipuzkoa, Mayor of San Sebastián Eneko Goia opened the meeting, noting that San Sebastián faces “two risks associated with the global phenomenon of climate change that test the resilience of the city itself: these are the sea and the river.”

He further noted the importance of the event in Tecnun, as it marks the launch of the testing phase of the SMR project's pilot tools, which aim to enhance cities’ capacity to resist, absorb and recover from the hazardous effects of climate change. SMR researchers work with the project partner cities of San Sebastián, Glasgow (UK) and Kristiansand (Norway) to develop tools to assess and develop cities’ resilience. Together, they develop and pilot tools in these three core cities. The tools are then reviewed and evaluated by researchers and by a group of four other partner cities. It is foreseen that they will be spread to cities in Europe and beyond.

The testing process was launched in February 2016 in Kristiansand with a workshop focusing on water, and continued in San Sebastián, where the main focus of the workshop was communication flows in the energy and telecommunication security sector, particularly in emergency situations. The next launch of tools testing will take place in Glasgow. The other four project cities – Bristol (UK), Vejle (Denmark), Rome (Italy) and Riga (Latvia) – will closely observe the testing process and learn alongside the pilot cities.

For more information, visit smr-project.eu.