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Union Civil Protection Mechanism Decision No 1313/2013/EU requires EU Member States and UCPM participating states to report to the Commission on their disaster risk management activities to support formulating an EU risk management policy that would complement and enhance the national ones. The aim of this report is to support the use of the new “Reporting Guidelines on Disaster Risk Management, Art. 6(1)d of Decision No.1313/2013/EU,” (2019/C 428/07) by relevant national authorities. This report is the second in the series of reports “Recommendations for National Risk Assessment for Disaster Risk Management”. The aim of this series of reports is to build-up a network of experts involved in the different aspects of the national risk assessment process. The European Commission Joint Research Centre joins national, regional and global efforts to acquire better risk governance structure through evidences, science and knowledge management. Risk governance facilitates policy cycle for the implementation of integrated disaster risk management. Risk Assessment is positioned at the heart of the policy cycle and provides evidence for DRM planning and the implementation of prevention and preparedness measures. This report explains the purpose and objective of each step of the reporting to give meaning and motivation to demanding risk governance processes. It collects the contributions of fourteen expert teams that prepared short step by step description of disaster risk assessment approaches specific for the chosen hazard/asset usable in the context of a national risk assessment exercise and addressed national risk assessment capability to be further developed in order to bring the evidence to next level A special focus is dedicated to capability needed to tackle climate change. The risks covered are of natural, anthropogenic and socio-natural origin: floods, droughts, wildfires, biodiversity loss, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, biological disasters, Natech accidents, chemical accidents, nuclear accidents, terrorist attacks, critical infrastructure disruptions, cybersecurity and hybrid threats., JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Management

This report presents an ecosystem assessment covering the total land area of the EU as well as the EU marine regions. The assessment is carried out by Joint Research Centre, European Environment Agency, DG Environment, and the European Topic Centres on Biological Diversity and on Urban, Land and Soil Systems. This report constitutes a knowledge base which can support the evaluation of the 2020 biodiversity targets. It also provides a data foundation for future assessments and policy developments, in particular with respect to the ecosystem restoration agenda for the next decade (2020-2030). The report presents an analysis of the pressures and condition of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems using a single, comparable methodology based on European data on trends of pressures and condition relative to the policy baseline 2010. The following main conclusions are drawn: - Pressures on ecosystems exhibit different trends. - Land take, atmospheric emissions of air pollutants and critical loads of nitrogen are decreasing but the absolute values of all these pressures remain too high. - Impacts from climate change on ecosystems are increasing. - Invasive alien species of union concern are observed in all ecosystems, but their impact is particularly high in urban ecosystems and grasslands. - Pressures from overfishing activities and marine pollution are still high. - In the long term, air and freshwater quality is improving. - In forests and agroecosystems, which represent over 80% of the EU territory, there are improvements in structural condition indicators (biomass, deadwood, area under organic farming) relative to the baseline year 2010 but some key bio-indicators such as tree-crown defoliation continue to increase. This indicates that ecosystem condition is not improving. - Species-related indicators show no progress or further declines, particularly in agroecosystems. The analysis of trends in ecosystem services concluded that the current potential of ecosystems to deliver timber, protection against floods, crop pollination, and nature-based recreation is equal to or lower than the baseline value for 2010. At the same time, the demand for these services has significantly increased. A lowered potential in combination with a higher demand risks to further decrease the condition of ecosystems and their contribution to human well-being. Despite the wide coverage of environmental legislation in the EU, there are still large gaps in the legal protection of ecosystems. On land, 76% of the area of terrestrial ecosystems, mainly forests, agroecosystems and urban ecosystems, are excluded from a legal designation under the Bird and Habitat Directives. Freshwater and marine ecosystems are subject to specific protection measures under the Water Framework and Marine Strategy Framework Directives. The condition of ecosystems that are under legal designation is unfavourable. More efforts are needed to bend the curve of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and to put ecosystems on a path to recovery. The progress that is made in certain areas such as pollution reduction, increasing air and water quality, increasing share of organic farming, the expansion of forests, and the efforts to maintain marine fish stocks at sustainable levels show that a persistent implementation of policies can be effective. These successes should encourage us to act now and to put forward an ambitious plan for the restoration of Europe’s ecosystems., JRC.D.3-Land Resources

Decision No 1313/2013/EU on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) calls Participating States to develop risk assessments periodically and make the summary of their National Risk Assessment (NRA) available to the European Commission as a way to prevent disaster risk in Europe. In order to facilitate countries on this task, the European Commission developed the Guidelines on risk assessment and mapping. In spite of these, the summaries received have revealed several challenges related to the process and the content of the assessments. The current report aims to provide scientific support to the UCPM participant countries in their development of NRA, explaining why and how a risk assessment could be carried out, how the results of this could be used for Disaster Risk Management planning and in general, how science can help civil protection authorities and staff from ministries and agencies engaged in NRA activities. The report is the result of the collaborative effort of the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre team and nine Joint Research Centre expert groups which provided their insight on tools and methods for specific risk assessment related to certain hazards and assets: drought, earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks, biological disasters, critical infrastructures, chemical accidents, nuclear accidents and Natech accidents. The current document would be improved by a next version that would include scientific guidance on other risks and the collaboration of potential users., JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Management

Droughts are complex, multifaceted hazards that affect multiple regions of the world and cause severe environmental and social impacts. The vulnerability to droughts, however, is complex to assess and strongly depends on the sectoral focus as well as on the geographical context of the assessment. This report presents the results of an expert survey that was conducted to weigh drought vulnerability indicators according to their relevance for agricultural systems and domestic water supply. Indicators originate from multiple dimensions (social, economic, infrastructure, crime and conflict, environmental and farming practices) and are grouped into four subcategories: social susceptibility, environmental susceptibility, lack of coping capacity and lack of adaptive capacity. The findings underline that the relevance of indicators strongly varies depending on the sector which is susceptible to the negative impacts of drought. Hence, the most relevant indicators for agricultural systems differentiate significantly from the most important ones for domestic water supply. The results are used in the GlobeDrought project to include expert judgement in the vulnerability assessments. This information will be compiled together with drought hazard and exposure information into a global drought risk assessment., JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Management

The study assesses how climate change could affect Europe in eleven impact areas. Under a high warming scenario, several climate impacts show a clear geographical north-south divide. Most of the welfare losses, assessed for six impact areas, would be greatly reduced under a 2ᵒC scenario., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

The results presented in this short technical report are focused on the 2018 Water Crisis that affected the Western Cape Province in South Africa. In one side it includes an analysis carried out by the JRC´s "Disaster Risk Management" Unit and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO report), which periodically provides an overview of precipitation patterns and its anomalies, including also those related to vegetation greenness and soil moisture values respect to the long term average. In the other, it presents a complementary section carried out by the WEFE4DEV Work Package of the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Project which contributes to the online African Atlas on WEFE Cooperation. The analysis is focused on the medium to long term spatio-temporal patterns and behaviour of precipitation and temperature patterns. Both help the community to better understand the exceptional character of these phonomena, their periodicity and the scale at which these events occur. The outcomes are helpful for policymakers to identify current and future issues that impact water management, food and energy security in Africa, as well as they providevaluable information to better define mitigation measures, resilience and adaptation policies., JRC.D.2-Water and Marine Resources

In the context of global warming, droughts are increasingly threatening our societies. They last for months or even years, affecting wide areas and large numbers of people, with single drought events sometimes causing economic damages for several billion Euros. Besides the economic damages, droughts can compromise ecosystems and threat food security in the most vulnerable countries. To reduce drought impacts, drought risk assessments need to be implemented in order to support policy makers and water managers in developing coping strategies and drought management plans. Due to the wide-ranging direct and indirect, often cascading impacts, drought risk assessments need to include information tailored to specific sectors and oriented to the needs of specific users. Drought risk as defined here is the likelihood to incur damages and economic losses during and after a drought and depends on the interactions between three dimensions: 1) the severity and the probability of occurrence of a certain drought event, 2) the exposed assets and/or people, and 3) their intrinsic vulnerability or capacity to cope with the hazard. The characterization of these dimensions and the representation of their interactions over different socio-economic sectors poses several challenges. This document discusses these challenges and proposes a theoretical framework to assess drought risk at global scale in order to provide policy relevant information. Based on the described conceptual approach, the JRC developed the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) as a first operational dynamic drought risk monitor for the entire globe. The report is structured as follows: Firstly, the causes and characteristics of drought events as well as their link with climate variability and climate change are discussed (chapters 1 and 2). Secondly, the concept of drought risk is presented, including a first approach to map drought risk at global scale as a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability (chapter 3). This framework is then linked to expected impacts in different economic sectors and the environment, including the discussion of case studies from Argentina, South Africa, Syria and the United States (chapter 4). Finally, a brief introduction to the key aspects of drought risk management and an outlook on future challenges and opportunities are presented in chapters 5 and 6., JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Management

This document reports the results of the analyses performed within the framework of the PESETA3 project regarding the Task 9 - Droughts. The main objective of this task is to provide robust scientific-based information to stakeholders and decision makers on the possible impacts of future climate scenarios on the occurrence of drought events. This report is focused on the analysis of the variations of soil moisture on the European continent, as well as of a soil moisture-based drought severity indicator (DSI), in order to evaluate the possible increase/decrease in future occurrence and severity of soil drought events and the related hazard and risk. Following the guideline of the project, five bias-corrected climatological datasets were used to force the LISFLOOD hydrological model that produces the daily soil moisture maps used in this analysis. These datasets were part of the EURO-CORDEX package and were used to characterize both the present reference period (1981-2010) and the future scenario at the date when a global 2 °C warming will occur according to the RCP8.5 scenario (different for each dataset and around the mid of the century). In the framework of this project, considering the specific purpose of the report, only the RCP8.5 scenario was selected in order to provide a clear indication on the possible future impacts of a strong climate change. The most relevant findings of the analysis depicted a scenario with differences that are statistically significant only on a limited fraction of the continental territories, with negative impacts limited to the Mediterranean and South-western Europe area for both soil moisture (reduction in water availability during both the dry and the wet season) and extreme drought events (increase in drought hazard). Particularly concerning is the increase of drought hazard over areas that are already drought prone and characterized by semi-arid climate, even if a limited impact on drought risk is expected due to the low present exposure and vulnerability of the same regions. Overall, it appears clear from this study that the EU goal to limit the global warming at 2 °C, as compared to the average temperature in pre-industrial times, will confine the variations in drought impacts to a minor fraction of the European continent in the near future, as shown by the obtained results., JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Management

Cheyne-Stokes Respiration and Arrhythmias ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate whether adequate treatment of Cheyne-Stokes respiration (CSR) reduces the risk of arrhythmic events in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). MethodsA cohort of 403 registry patients with CHF (LVEF45%, NYHA-class2) and implanted cardioverter-defibrillator devices (ICD) was studied. They underwent overnight polygraphy, with 221 having mild or no CSR (apnea-hypopnea index [AHI]15/h). Latter ones were offered therapy with adaptive servoventilation (ASV), which 96 patients accepted and 86 rejected. During follow-up (21 15 months) defibrillator therapies were recorded in addition to clinical and physiologic measures of heart failure severity. ResultsEvent-free survival from (a) appropriate cardioverter-defibrillator therapies and (b) appropriately monitored ventricular arrhythmias was shorter in the untreated CSR group compared to the treated CSR and the no CSR group. Stepwise Cox proportional hazard regression analysis showed untreated CSR (a: hazard ratio [HR] 1.99, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.46-2.72, P < 0.001; b: HR 2.19, 95%CI 1.42-3.37, P < 0.001), but not treated CSR (a: HR 1.06, 95%CI 0.74-1.50; P = 0.77; b: HR 1.21, 95%CI 0.75-1.93, P = 0.43) was an independent risk factor. The treated CSR group showed improvements in cardiac function and respiratory stability compared to the untreated CSR group. ConclusionThis study demonstrates a decrease of appropriate defibrillator therapies by ASV treated CSR in patients with CHF and ICD. A reduced exposure to hyperventilation, hypoxia, and improvement in indices of CHF severity and neurohumoral disarrangements are potential causative mechanisms.

International workshops and conferences have, for many years, noted the importance of drought monitoring and have called for the creation of drought early warning systems (the 2007 GEO Ministerial Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, the 2009 WMO-sponsored Inter- Regional Workshop on Indices and Early Warning Systems for Drought in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, and the 2010 Global Drought Assessment Workshop [GDAW] in Asheville, North Carolina, USA, are recent examples). Drought monitoring, assessment, response, mitigation, adaptation, and early warning systems have been created in a number of countries around the world, and some regional and continental efforts have been successful, but a global drought early warning system (GDEWS) remains elusive. The National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) U.S. Drought Portal is a web-based information system created to address drought services and early warning in the United States, including drought monitoring, forecasting, impacts, mitigation, research, and education. It was recognized at the April 2010 GDAW that the creation of a Global Drought Monitoring web portal (GDMP) as a clearinghouse for global drought information would be highly beneficial, but neither the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) nor Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has the resources to provide such a program (GEO does not directly fund initiatives but relies upon donated efforts from GEO members). The managers of the NIDIS portal agreed to develop a prototype GDMP. The GDMP is made interoperable with the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) by utilizing Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Mapping Services (WMS) and other web services to exchange drought maps (and other information) among existing continental and regional drought monitoring efforts, including the North American Drought Monitor (which provides coverage for North America, including Canada, USA, and Mexico), the European Drought Observatory (which provides coverage for the European continental region), and the Princeton University African Drought Monitor (which provides African continental coverage). The Republic of Argentina is a full member and is currently being integrated into the GDMP, and the Commonwealth of Australia is also in the process of having portions of the Australia Water Availability Project being incorporated into the GDMP. The GDMP will provide global coverage of drought indicators computed using a standard methodology, such as the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) (at time scales corresponding to meteorological and hydrological drought) computed from Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) in situ data, deployment of hydrologic drought indicators for full water budget drought assessment in semi-arid terrains, and satellite-observed and modeled soil moisture (for agricultural drought). In addition, the OGC and other web services will empower the GDMP with a drill down capability providing access to the regional and continental assessments, national drought products, and local drought analyses produced within the participating countries. This paper will discuss the creation of the GDMP, its functionality, and its potential applications within the context of a GDEWS., JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Management

Drought indicators identify the envelope or boundaries of drought zones, so that the course of the drought zone may be charted over time. However, drought lacks a precise and universally accepted definition, so that multiple drought indicators are necessary to more reliably document when drought occurs:drought is a ¿creeping¿ phenomenon, so that identification of the earlier stages of drought is extremely difficult (Castillo 2009; Moreira et al 2008). Hence, multiple indicators and indices have been developed in order to detect drought, the impact of drought on the various water budget components (evapotranspiration, precipitation, soil water and runoff), iimpact of drought upon uses of water, and remote sensing-based vegetation health indicators, designed to monitor vegetation water stress over very large tracts of land, such as the Russian Federation. In short, drought monitoring at regional and global scales calls for integrating the information of multiple disciplines, as well as semantic registration and linking of datasets to the detailed components of the water cycle. At the same time, global drought monitoring involves drought monitoring terminology among multiple languages in Europe, Africa, South America, and East Asia. The EuroGEOSS discovery broker is a contribution to the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The Discovery Augmentation Component enables semanticsaware discovery by matching the search patterns entered by the end user against a collection of multilingual, thesauri: these are controlled vocabularies providing multiple textual representations for terms and organizing them according to specificity and relatedness. As a consequence, the user¿s query is first related to a set of language-neutral identifiers (e.g., URIs) that represent entities in a concept graph that the user may navigate for identifying related terms that are relevant to a relief agency or drought manager¿s search. These data structures are hosted by the GENESIS Vocabulary Service. These thesauri are provided in the Simple Knowledge Organizing System (SKOS) format, a lightweight ontology for expressing knowledge organization systems, harmonized in the context of GEO and EuroGEOSS project areas, by relating terms from distinct thesauri, thus allowing the user to move from one categorization to the other. The user identifies a set of terms (concept listings for drought areas), combined with drawing a box on a map, at which point the broker translates the corresponding URIs back to a customizable set of languages and executes multiple queries against the catalogs it is federating. The General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) and the INSPIRE Feature Concept Dictionary and Glossary these reference thesauri proved to be too general as to express the specificities of drought-related datasets and services, as well as details of the water cycle, that are necessary to identify whether drought has occurred, along with the severity of drought and the magnitude of its impacts. As a result, a new thematic thesaurus was established for water that could more easily be used for annotation and discovery and to bring the water thesaurus more in alignment with the drought activities, including metadata drought creation and the indicators and datasets used in common with the European Drought Observatory. The water thesaurus chosen was derived from the USA Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) water ontology, version 1. An expanded version of the CUAHSI water ontology is being translated into SKOS data structures and linked to relevant terms in the reference thesauri. The resulting system will provide concept searches, which will improve on simple keyword searches, and provide greater versatility for more diverse semi-arid drought locations, such as Africa, complimenting coverage in the more moisture-rich European areas., JRC.DDG.H.7-Land management and natural hazards

Drought is one of the major weather-related disasters. Persisting over months or years, droughts can affect large areas and may have serious environmental, social and economic impacts. Over the last decades many European countries have repeatedly been affected by droughts, resulting in considerable ecological and economic damage. Climate change studies further indicate a trend towards increasing climate variability in many parts of the world, most likely resulting in more frequent drought occurrences also in Europe. The need for an adequate monitoring and management is, therefore, evident and has recently triggered action at different political and management levels. An adequate management of droughts requires up-to-date information on the occurrence and severity of drought episodes as well as information on possible impacts and the probability of their duration. JRC, therefore, develops the prototype of a European Drought Observatory (EDO) to monitor, assess and forecast drought events across the entire European continent. As droughts can affect the entire water cycle (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, stream flow and groundwater) and have direct impacts on the vegetation cover, all these components need careful monitoring. To do so, a suite of indicators is calculated from different data sources in order to capture various aspects of a drought event and to forecast its probable evolution. In order to provide information at different operational scales, close collaboration with national and regional observatories needs to be ensured through adequate interoperability arrangements, thus providing comparable information at different spatial and temporal resolutions. At the core of the European Drought Observatory (EDO) are a web portal and map server presenting up-to-date drought relevant information for entire Europe to the public and to decision makers in policy and water resources management. The current version of the EDO map server publishes continental information based on data processed and analysed at JRC. Available drought products include a monthly updated Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), daily updated modelled soil moisture anomalies, and remote sensing observations on the state of the vegetation cover (i.e. anomaly of the fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR), Normalized DifferenceWater Index (NDWI)). A one-week soil moisture anomaly forecast complements the picture. First interoperability arrangements allow accessing more detailed information at national and river basin scale. In addition, time series of drought indices can be retrieved for all administrative regions in Europe, visualizing the temporal evolution over several years. Current research work is focusing on validating the available products, extending the interoperability with national and regional drought information systems and testing medium-range probabilistic drought forecasting products. Probabilistic forecasts are attractive in that they provide an estimate of the range of uncertainty in a particular forecast. Longer-term goals include the development of long-range drought forecasting products, the development of methodologies for monitoring drought impact and the integration of EDO in a global drought monitoring system., JRC.DDG.H.7-Land management and natural hazards

The CCM River and Catchment Database for Europe contains digital data on river networks and catchment boundaries for the entire European continent. The data are structured in a nested manner from small river reaches and their catchments to large rivers and their river basins. Different hierarchical catchment levels are linked to each other and river reaches are linked to their catchments (i.e. the area they drain) through a common identifier. River reaches and catchments carry a set of attributes, including their Strahler Order and their Pfafstetter Hydrological Feature Code. Both attributes are fundamental for understanding and analysing the data and are briefly introduced. In this document the theoretical concepts of Strahler ordering and of Pfafstetter coding are explained, followed by the description of two tools that were developed to support working with the CCM River and Catchment database. The first one allows analysing upstream – downstream relationships within river networks. It is based on the Pfafstetter hydrological feature codes. The second one allows for displaying the catchment of a hydrological monitoring station by clicking on the station. This tool is specific to a set of several thousand stations from EEA’s Waterbase, which have been located within the CCM River and Catchment database., JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resources

The present invention is related to a breath pacing device (10) for pacing the respiratory activity of a subject, comprising an output unit (12) for outputting a sequence of output signals, a control unit (16) provided to control the output unit, and an input unit (14) connected to or integrated into the output unit for generating an input signal related to a respiration characteristic of a subject. The control unit is provided to control the length of the sequence at least based on characteristics of the input signal. The invention is further related to a corresponding method for pacing the respiratory activity of a subject.