3-Year Initiative to Strengthen Disaster Resilience in Northern Communities

Working with partners from Ireland and Finland HA, SSNE, and IACN have launched a three-year initiative aimed at helping communities build greater resilience against future disasters. The project focuses on empowering local communities to carry out self-assessments and develop tailored emergency preparedness and response plans.

Through a series of roundtable workshops, the initiative will bring together communities, municipalities, first responders, and other key stakeholders to identify best practices in emergency preparedness and response. These discussions will span local, regional, national, and transnational levels, with attention to both the immediate response and long-term recovery phases of emergencies.

The first workshop recently took place in Cork, Ireland, marking the beginning of the planning phase for a series of pilot projects. Initial pilots will focus on oil spill scenarios, as well as wildfires. Two pilots, focusing on mass marine rescue operations and avalanche/landslide responses, will be carried out in northern Iceland.

This initiative is funded by the Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme, an EU programme that supports cooperation among remote and sparsely populated communities in Europe's northernmost regions on matters of shared importance.

NACEMAP | University of Akureyri