Bridging the gap between scientists and policymakers: the experience of the H2020 CORE project

Shaping and favoring informed-based decisions is a pivotal responsibility for both scientists and policymakers. Lessons and insights drawn from analyzing past disasters should be documented and shared transparently, using clear and inclusive language. This facilitates identification of challenges that policymakers might face in implementing such findings, especially obstacles arising from end-users, such as citizens.

The H2020 CORE EU project entails developing public guidance for enhancing community readiness for emergencies, covering pre-event and post event-response knowledge, and consolidating findings into an accessible online repository, extending availability of findings beyond the project's duration.

The CORE project is aimed at building a chain of trust, credibility and citizen engagement, providing guidance and recommendations for policymakers and society, and distilling the project's essence into actionable advice, starting from case studies from Europe and beyond (i.e. L’Aquila earthquake,  Italy (2009), Manchester arena bombing, UK (2017), Venkatapuran industrial accident, India  (2020), Aude region flash flooding, France  (2018), Great east Japan earthquake and tsunami, Japan  (2011), Jerusalem wildfire, Israel (2021), and finally Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2023)).

Among its main achievements, CORE has produced a standardized system  template able to analyse disaster case studies, with the aim of fostering transparency and uniformity in data collection and simplifying comparisons across diverse EU regions. Moreover, the project has issued recommendations to governments aimed at enhancing companies' resilience in the face of supply chain disruptions to reduce goods shortages. Additionally, a safety culture toolkit within the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) context was developed, catering to diverse stakeholders, such as citizens, public authorities, and practitioners.

Furthermore, the project provided guidance to policymakers on understanding the public’s consumer behaviours of available information, identifying information needs, and determining preferred communication channels. Specifically, the initiative from CORE included recommendations to counter misinformation both before, during, and after disastrous events.

This work has been supported by the CORE ("sCience and human factor for Resilient sociEty") project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101021746.