Overview
Climate change is the defining crisis of our time. No country on earth is immune to its consequences. The frequency of natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes, droughts and wildfires has increased. Therefore, planning and command tools and new methods to address the crisis are needed now more than ever. In this context, the EU-funded OVERWATCH project will build a system that is a valuable resource for citizen, land and infrastructure protection. Specifically, it will develop an integrated holographic management system for the response to, recovery from and mitigation of emergencies and disasters. Combining the use of EGNSS and Copernicus with AI, drones, 5G and augmented reality, the project will enable authorities to quickly respond to emergencies.
Climate change is happening and the need for a higher performance crisis planning & command tools and new methodologies arises from the increasing frequency and impact of a variety of natural hazards, including floods, earthquakes, droughts, landslides, and wildfires that are responsible for dead, wounded, or displaced people and severe destruction and disruption of property and industry with clear impact on economy for years after the event.
Natural disasters, which can be related with the 1,672 recorded disasters (Floods, storms, wildfires, heatwaves) in Europe between 1970 and 2019 that took 159,438 lives and impacted the economy in excess of 420M€.
The objective of OVERWATCH is to develop an integrated holographic management system for response, recovery and mitigation of emergencies and disasters, by enabling the authorities to quickly deploy and manage air, water and ground assets and personnel through decision support tools integrated in an immersive and decentralized command platform.
This system will be supported by combining several services already offered by EGNSS and Copernicus Emergency Management and Security (for example and HAS and SAR) with digital technologies, artificial intelligence, drones, 5G, augmented reality which will provide the required performance to make this system a valuable resource for citizen, land and infrastructure protection.