From earthquakes to floods: the European funded project helping communities to prepare for disaster readiness

RMIT researchers on the C2IMPRESS project have led the development of community-driven disaster resilience strategies to help societies prepare for different hazards.

When natural disasters strike, they often don't come alone.

A heatwave can spark forest fires, an earthquake can trigger landslides, dam failures and flooding.

These compound events are becoming more intense, more frequent, and more interconnected.

RMIT researchers have helped communities to prepare for these scenarios as part of their work on the C2IMPRESS project, an EU-funded collaboration involving 16 partners across Europe and Australia.

According to Dr Hossein Moradi who worked on the project at RMIT Europe, and Dr Sebastian Rodriguez from RMIT's School of Computing Technologies, traditional disaster management is no longer enough.

"Most approaches still focus on one hazard at a time, but real-world disasters rarely work like that," Moradi said.

"They can quickly trigger one another and disrupt infrastructure in unpredictable ways."

C2IMPRESS has developed a place- and people-centred approach to disaster preparedness.

Instead of a top-down model, the project worked directly with citizens, researchers and authorities to co-create strategies grounded in local realities.

One of the project's most innovative features is the feedback loop it creates between communities and scientific modelling.

Local knowledge, gathered through surveys, workshops and focus groups, feeds into advanced simulations.

These models then inform policies and preparedness plans, which are refined in collaboration with the very communities they serve.

"This ongoing exchange is what makes C2IMPRESS different," Moradi said.

"It gives our work long-term impact and ensures innovation isn't just happening in a lab; it's rooted in lived experience."

RMIT's role has centred on understanding and simulating how people behave during complex disasters.

The team developed a human-centred simulation framework - a digital environment where virtual 'agents' make decisions based on realistic behavioural archetypes.

These archetypes reflect different decision styles and attitudes toward risk, drawn from extensive community engagement.

In the simulations, agents decide whether to wait for more information, look after family, evacuate early, or follow official guidance: choices that can significantly influence emergency outcomes.

By testing scenarios such as blocked roads, missed warnings, or ignored alerts, the simulations reveal potential weak points in emergency plans and help identify practical solutions.

"It's not just about building models," Moradi said.

"It's about using those models to help societies plan better, communicate more clearly, and hopefully save lives."

While C2IMPRESS is focused on European case study areas, the simulation framework is designed to be scalable and flexible.

This means it could be adapted to a coastal zone in Southeast Asia, a bushfire-prone region in Australia, or anywhere facing interconnected climate risks.

"On a practical level, our simulations can directly improve planning in the areas we've studied," Moradi said.

"But because the framework is adaptable, it can be applied far beyond Europe."

The project has already contributed to global research on disaster management, with its findings published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and a conference paper published at the Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Learn more about the project on the C2IMPRESS website.