Matina Halkia (DG Joint Research Centre [JRC])
The Peace and Stability Team in the Disaster Risk Management Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), has recently launched the Science4Peace Portal, which is an integrated information and geospatial data platform specifically designed to facilitate and support policy decisions. The tool allows the user to query, analyse and combine data on situational awareness, conflict risk indicators, and real time news feeds for early warning. In addition to this, the portal provides a catalogue of maps produced by the JRC to meet the needs of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the Foreign Policy Instrument (FPI) as well as a collection of geospatial layers for post-conflict damage assessment and recovery, which serve to enhance the understanding of information and capacity-building needs on the ground. By combining expertise from remote sensing, statistics and geospatial technology, the Science4Peace Portal is able to bring together conflict risk prevention and crisis management tools on a single platform. Intended to provide evidence-based tools for services addressing the Junker priority No.9 “EU as a stronger global actor”, the Science4Peace Portal is being developed in order to support the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP). It focuses on further refining the Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI), to disseminate and promote its use as well as improving geospatial technology (remote sensing and GIS mapping) for analysis of open source information by the EEAS and related DGs (FPI, DEVCO, NEAR, ECHO and HOME).