Large Scale RISKs - Risk Management for Large Scale Infrastructures in the Romanian Bulgarian cross border area

The pre-condition of a sound risk management activity is the due and comprehensive understanding of the existing vulnerabilities, hazards and potential calculated risks. It is one of the communist era heritages - both in Bulgaria and Romania- that important Large Scale Infrastructure/ LSI objectives were treated in maximum of secrecy, without any consideration of social acceptance or even understanding by the involved population. The identified problem is the incremental risk factor due to the lack of knowledge and understanding of the context and functioning of LSI in the RO BG cross border area. LSI was localized only taking in account technical and economic reasons. Dams and power plants, bridges, nuclear industry units, chemical plants, military units, waste treatment plants are LSI which generated huge anthropic hazard sources which are included eventually in emergency management plans, but for sure public awareness is missing. “Lost opportunity risk” is defined as the risk generated by the lack of ability of a region to take development advantage of a LSI located there. This is a specific anthropic risk conducting to social/economic catastrophes such as depopulation, extreme poverty etc. The project is contributing to make the ROBG 2014+ program area safer by addressing specific atrophic hazards and possible mitigation. The addressed project area is ranked as the less developed EU region but an area in which important strategic objectives are located. On the Romanian side we have Cernavoda, Danube Harbors, Iron gate, Navigation channel, ferry stations, ELI NP. On the Bulgarian side we have Kozlodui, Belene, Ruse, harbors, navigation channel and ferryboat stations. The population living in the impact area of the targeted LSI is estimated to be over 5,000,000 (3.16 million (66%) in Romania 1.61 million (34%) in Bulgaria). The following map is illustrating some of the significant existing and emerging region relevant LSIs.

Our project aims at contributing to increase the local public awareness regarding LSI through training and communication. These activities will be targeted to LSI managements, NGOs, local and central governments. The overall cost incurred by the proposed actions is about EUR 1.100.000.

The proposed actions are proposing better explanation to the targeted social-economic segments of how LSI are working, which are the benefits, which are the assumed hazards, how risks are configured and mitigated.

After a sound and comprehensive inventory of the ranked LSI in the program area LSI specific management and communication plans will be developed and validated by the project steering group. This project steering group will include the major actors/ stakeholders in charge with risk management, the local authorities and the civil society organizations. Actions include training sessions, simulations, site visits and workshops.

The targeted output indicator is: “Population benefiting from actions of risk management”, proposed value for 2023: 2.500.000.

The assumed contribution of the project could be the increase of the number of population informed regarding the LSI to 100,000. This would be realized by a proper info/communication activity, using direct channels and communicators.

The result indicator of the “satisfaction rate of the population” will be for sure increased because informed population will be able to answer the Programme proposed survey!

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