B-prepared: How an EU-funded project turned gaming into a climate-resilience tool

Climate change poses a growing threat to internal security, claiming human lives and endangering critical infrastructure. Lessons learnt from past tragedies highlight the vital need to equip citizens with the knowledge and tools to act swiftly during disasters. Despite existing learning materials and disaster alert applications available to the public, these solutions and traditional information campaigns have shown low impact on citizen preparedness, and live drills are extremely expensive.  

The EU-funded security research project B-prepared aims to teach disaster survival skills to European citizens. It focuses on the critical gap between alert systems and citizen response, offering a platform that empowers individuals to effectively respond to climate-related emergencies and ensure collective safety. The project offers an immersive experience, which can be converted into role-playing and data collection, while emphasising collaboration and teamwork. 

Promoting climate resilience through gaming culture  

At its core, B-prepared consists of a collaborative platform where users can build and share knowledge on extreme weather events and means to survive them. This important resource serves as the foundation for three demonstrator applications, in the form of games.  

First, a cooperative multiplayer game provides a remarkably realistic simulation of disaster scenarios, delivering a unique near-real experience, and emphasises teamwork, collaboration, and effective communication as indispensable aspects of survival. Then, an interactive gamified mobile application, tailored with age-appropriate content and enhanced features for a diverse public, fosters a culture of preparedness, engaging users across demographics and ensuring widespread accessibility. Finally, a learning management system measures and compares preparedness levels achieved by gamers, offering a unified scale for assessment and enabling users to track their progress. 

The project has received nearly EUR 5 million in EU funding under Horizon Europe’s Civil Security for Society. It was launched in October 2023 and will end in September 2026, when the platform and applications will become fully available to the public. 

Building sustainable resilience and public safety 

The EU Security Union Strategy (2020-2025) prioritises civil security research, focusing on areas that enhance security for European citizens. Given the devastating impact of natural disasters like floods, which have affected 5.5 million people, caused 3,000 fatalities, and incurred €170 billion in economic losses over the past 30 years, citizen preparedness and public safety are key priorities. 

Given the costliness of live training and simulation, the B-prepared project has proved to be a particularly cost-effective and innovative solution, using cutting-edge technologies and gamification to educate and empower citizens in the field of disaster preparedness.   

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A new way forward on internal security