The second round of applications in the EU’s major commitment to security research closed last week.
“FOI is already an active and successful participant in the program for security research, but now we have raised our sights,” says Eva-Lotta Kraft, division director at FOI.
In the first round FOI is taking part in three of the total of twelve research projects that were funded and are now underway.
“In this second round, we have striven to demonstrate that we are a research player to be reckoned with in the field of European security,” says Eva-Lotta Kraft, who heads the FOI Strategy and Market Division. “We are now part of seventeen applications and are project coordinator for a couple of them.”
Research targeting security and space has high priority in the EU’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, which covers the period 2007 to 2013. Security and space combined are suggested to receive funding amounting to €4 billion during the period.
FOI has established collaboration with other leading European research organizations, such as TNO in the Netherlands, as well as a number of Swedish players in research and business.
“We are well poised to carry out successful research on European security and to help strengthen the security of citizens through new knowledge and technology,” says Per-Erik Johansson, who coordinates FOI participation in EU security research programs. The project applications largely deal with crisis management in one form or another. They target preventive measures, such as creating awareness or building less vulnerable infrastructures. Further, they are about planning, executing, and learning from operative efforts and finding good ways to return to everyday life following crises.
“We also see that our well-established position as an international research player in the field of defense can be a great advantage as more and more opportunities arise for synergies between civil and defense-related research,” Per-Erik Johansson points out.
Of the two applications coordinated by FOI in the second round of applications, one deals with mapping and prioritizing various forms of terrorist threat (Eurosecurity) and the other with closer cooperation between the crisis management centers of various nations and the establishment of a network to connect such centers already in existence (iEMC2). Both of these projects have been set up in collaboration with a number of leading Swedish and European players.
