DG ECHO co-funded European Project POSOW 2 launched!

The Preparedness for Oil-polluted Shoreline cleanup and Oiled Wildlife interventions Project (POSOW 2) officially kicked off on 1st January 2015. Co-funded by the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (DG ECHO) and coordinated by the Centre of Documentation, Research and Experimentation on Accidental Water Pollution (Cedre, France), this 2-year project also involves the Regional Marine Pollution Emergency Response Centre for the Mediterranean Sea (REMPEC, Malta), the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA, Italy), the Instituto Portuario de Estudios y Cooperacion de la Comunidad Valenciana (FEPORTS, Spain), the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT , Egypt) and the General Directorate of Maritime and Inland Waters (DG-MARINWA, Turkey). The beneficiary countries of the project will be seven southern Mediterranean countries, namely Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey.

POSOW 2 is a follow-up to the project POSOW 1, run in 2012 and 2013,which was also co-funded by DG ECHO and benefited eight countries, namely Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Slovenia and Spain. The main aim remains to reinforce the knowledge and skills of volunteers involved in spill response in the Mediterranean area, by developing training materials and manuals and by running training courses. Following the issues of volunteer management, oiled shoreline assessment, oiled shoreline clean-up and oiled wildlife response addressed in POSOW 1, POSOW 2 is set to cover the themes of waste management and assistance to fishermen involved in response on water. These two themes will be the focus of guides, posters, PowerPoint presentations and train-the-trainer manuals, produced in English by FEPORTS and Cedre respectively in cooperation with all the Partners of the Project. All the materials developed during POSOW 1 and 2 will then be translated into Turkish by DG-MARINWA and into Arabic by AASTMT.

The second year of the project will focus on training. Firstly, two four-day Train-the-Trainer courses, on the six POSOW themes, will be organised at Cedre with cooperation from REMPEC, ISPRA and FEPORTS for 42 future trainers. The participants will be from civil protection departments, local authorities and NGOs in the seven southern Mediterranean countries. The trained trainers will then be tasked with running an initial National Pilot Training course in their own respective countries, drawing on the materials available in their language.

The participants trained at Cedre or in the countries targeted by POSOW 2 will be recorded in the database developed during POSOW 1, which already lists 276 people trained during POSOW 1 in the eight abovementioned target countries.

For further information and for free downloads of the many training materials developed during the projects POSOW 1 and 2, please visit the website www.posow.org.