On June 19th, we held the second of these four local workshops at the Central Baptist Church in Essex, organized by Anglia Ruskin University and Essex County Council.

The objective of MEDiate is to collaboratively design and develop a Decision Support System (DSS) for disaster risk management by involving local stakeholders and communities from the project’s four testbeds. As part of the second cycle of the Participatory Action Research methodology, local stakeholder workshops will take place in June 2024 across the testbeds.

The workshop aimed to identify how stakeholders would like the risk and impact to be assessed in Essex and what mitigations they think would be helpful and acceptable. It also sought to present the interacting natural hazards considered the most critical for Essex and Essex’s vulnerability to those hazards, including socio-economic vulnerability.

The event included informative and interactive sessions during which the stakeholders helped shape the decision-making tool for assessing the risk of multi-hazard events. Local and regional authorities, critical infrastructure providers, large businesses, SMEs, communities prone to disasters, and voluntary organizations were invited to attend.