Objectives

The main objective of the HAZADR project, running from October 2012 to March 2015, is the establishment of a cross-border network for the prevention of risks and for the early management of emergencies, in order to reduce the risk of pollution and contamination of the Adriatic sea and its coasts. Therefore, HAZADR aims at strengthening a common reaction capacity of the communities belonging to the Adriatic Region against environmental and technological hazards due to collisions, shipwrecking and spillage of oil and toxic material into the sea that could seriouslypollute the marine environment and damage the socio-economic activities of the Adriatic coastal communities. In synthesis, HAZADR helps the Adriatic regions:

to upgrade the knowledge framework over the estimated environmental and socio-economic risks in the most vulnerable Adriatic areas due both to natural and human-induced factors, as well as the harmonization of the laws governing the protection of the sea from pollution;

 

 

to provide the Adriatic emergency corps with a standardized decision support system (called: Real Time Risk Prevention System ) that helps understanding where the oil spill goes in case of hazards: such information becomes crucial to accelerate, both across the coasts and in the open sea, the single, interregional or cross-border procedures to combat the pollution and reduce the environmental damages;

 

to set up a common database on the state of readiness and spatial distribution of pollution preventing equipment along the Adriatic coasts as well as the improvement of the operational instruments and oil spill mitigation programmes to cope with the environmental and technological hazards;

 

to enhance the prevention structures in some of the most sensitive economic and ecologic poles of Adriatic through a joint meteorological radar monitoring program (based on a set of radar systems and VHF devices) and innovative oil-spill detection programmes;

 

to harmonize, improve and shorten the deployment time of the cross-border reaction capacity in the event of oil, toxic and hazardous substances spill through the organization of some cross-border joint oil-spill simulations and exercises in the Adriatic;

 

to reinforce - through the establishment of one Adriatic Training and Research Centre based in Rijeka and the cooperation with the European and International Organizations -a cross-border emergency capacity:this will be done by providing training to command personnel, operational staff and other actors involved in contingency plan and pollution prevention from all over the Adriatic.