Report: CERIDES in Georgia for DG-ECHO Project HOPE and PPRD East 3

January 15, 2023
Christos Dimopoulos

CERIDES is pleased to announce the successful implementation of the Training Event and Project Meeting of the DG-ECHO Full-Scale Exercise project HOPE, which took place in Tbilisi, Georgia, during the 6th and the 7th  of December 2022. The CERIDES team which co-organized and attended the event consisted of Mr. Evangelos Katsaros, CERIDES Research Associate and Dr. Georgia Solomonidou, Dissemination and Communication Manager. Although the country of Georgia is not an official beneficiary of the project HOPE, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Georgia realizes the benefits of the cross border collaboration within this project and actively participates in all project activities, honoring its governmental agreement with the country of Armenia.

The objectives of the Training Event which took place on the 6th of December, were for the countries involved to share their strong presence and experiences from Cross Border Cooperation, and to help Armenia and Georgia in elevating and optimizing their processes in several levels (e.g rethinking of capacities, capabilities, procedures to be used, utilize innovative tools and resources).

The Ministry of Emergency Situations (Armenia), the Ministry of Interior / Cyprus Civil Defense (Cyprus), Protection and Rescue Directorate (North Macedonia), Ministry of Interior (Montenegro) Ministry of Interior (France) and General Secretariat Civil Protection (Greece) have provided important input to the joint meeting by presenting key instances, features and lessons learned from several recent occasions of Emergency and Disastrous situations where cross-border cooperation was requested..

The official HOPE Project Meeting took place on the 7th of December. During the meeting the HOPE partners discussed the status and next steps of the project as well as the lessons learned from other DG- ECHO Full Scale Exercise projects in which members of the consortium are participating. The partners also examined the outline of HOPE’s TableTop eXercise (TTX), which is plannedto take place in May 2023, and the Full Scale Exercise (FSX) which is planned to take place in October 2023.

On the 8th of December, the consortium of HOPE along with the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Georgia participated in the PPRD East 3 Project Conference, which took place in Tbilisi, Georgia. PPRD East 3 is a project for Capacity Development in Disaster Risk Management partnering with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

The HOPE FSX project is funded by the Directorate-General (DG) for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations – (ECHO), through the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (Call: UCPM-2021-EXT). CERIDES acts as the Coordinating Organisation for this project. The aim of the project is to improve civil protection preparedness and response capabilities of Armenia in dealing with large, complex disasters that require joint response coordination facilitated via the Union Civil Protection Mechanism and INSARAG. South Caucasus countries’ efforts for sustainable development are clearly threatened by a devastating earthquake. Thus, sharing capacities, capabilities and resources, scientific support decision making, use of proven innovative tools, and joint training / exercising can lead to radical improvement of international cross border cooperation procedures of the Mechanism.

The CERIDES Team responsible for the management, coordination, and implementation of the HOPE project, comprises of the following scientists:

Mr. Evangelos Katsaros (Project Manager)

Dr. Christos Dimopoulos (Scientific Manager)

Dr. Georgia Solomonidou (Research Associate)

Professor George Boustras (Scientific Advisor)