About ADAPT

ADAPT – Awareness of Disaster Prevention for Vulnerable Groups – is a disaster prevention project co-financed by the European Commission’s DG ECHO.

In disaster situations such as floods or earthquakes, the elderly or people with disabilities are particularly vulnerable and require additional attention. However, they are often neglected in existing municipal emergency plans, particularly if they live at home instead of in a care institution. During emergency evacuations, their location and special needs are often unknown to relief workers. The reason for this is not the lack of information, which exists as both formal and informal knowledge, but the lack of structure of this knowledge. ADAPT aims to alleviate this problem by making and keeping this information usable by involving the local communities themselves in improving this part of their disaster resilience.

Two main tools will be created to achieve these goals:

A dataplatform to enable emergency personnel to better aid the elderly or people with disabilities in case of emergency evacuations. This data platform will aggregate existing data from stakeholders as well as allow for the entry of new data.

To keep the information up to date and the data platform usable in the communities participating in the project, a community-based management process will be developed in the later stages of the project.

While the project will implement these measures only on the participating communities, transferability of the results is a strong focus of the project, to enable adaptation into the emergency structures in communities all over Europe.

Project cycle

In the following, you can see a simplified overview of the project’s phases: