The EU-funded H2020 project PROACTIVE led by the UIC Security Division held its 12th consortium meeting on 13 – 14 April 2022 in Lancaster, UK. Almost all consortium partners met again in physical format and others joined the meeting online.

The consortium partners reported on work completed to date and exchanged on the ongoing tasks and project activities before the summer holiday period. The current focus is the publication of the deliverable with lessons learnt from the first CBRNe field training exercise which focused on decontamination after a rail chemical incident. The partners presented the preliminary results from this field training exercise organised jointly with project eNOTICE, which took place in Dortmund on 7 May 2022. Furthermore, the Security Advisory Board members participated online and provided very useful comments for the deliverable.

The project partners also discovered the exercise video available on the PROACTIVE YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/mI-oo5YFWEE) as well as the video trailer: https://youtu.be/3SU84EaA3bQ

The next major project event is the field training exercise which will be hosted in Rieti, Italy in November 2022. This will be the second joint event between the EU-funded projects PROACTIVE and eNOTICE with the aim of enhancing response capabilities of first responders.

Therefore, on 14 June afternoon and 15 morning PROACTIVE organised a planning meeting. The discussions held with the eNOTICE partners from Italy were successful and point towards another railway-focused scenario. The focus will be on an initial operational response requiring coordination between multiple stakeholders. As with the Dortmund exercise, the role-play volunteers involved in the exercise will be civilians recruited by PROACTIVE from the general public who have little-to-no prior knowledge of CBRNe incidents. At least 15% of them will represent vulnerable groups.

The next progress meeting will take place on 6 – 8 September in Warsaw, Poland.

The PROACTIVE project (PReparedness against CBRNE threats through cOmmon Approaches between security praCTItioners and the VulnerablE civil society) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 832981.

PROACTIVE can be followed on Twitter (@PROACTIVE_EU) as well as on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/proactive-eu/) and the project website https://proactive-h2020.eu/.