The Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project has received first prize at two award ceremonies this month for its innovative and effective standardisation activities. SMR, which concluded in 2018, used a holistic approach to develop Resilience Management Guidelines to support urban decision-makers in developing and implementing resilience measures in their cities.

On 13 November 2019, the project team was awarded the CEN-CENELEC Standards + Innovation Award at an award ceremony in ICLEI Member Brussels (Belgium). The project’s scientific coordinator Jose Julio Gonzalez accepted the award on behalf of the project partners, including ICLEI Europe.

CEN and CENELEC’s Standards + Innovation Awards acknowledge the important contribution of research and innovation to standardisation, and celebrate the contributions of researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs to standardisation. The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) are two of the three officially recognised European Standardisation Organisations.

The previous week, ICLEI Europe staff Holger Robrecht, Vasilis Latinos and Clara Grimes were awarded the DIN Innovators Award 2019 for their work on standardisation as part of the SMR project at a ceremony in ICLEI Member Berlin (Germany). DIN has also put out a video (in German) about their impactful work. The award ceremony was organised by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), which is the German national organisation for standardisation.

The annual DIN Innovators Award is open to initiators of standardisation activities in which research results have been transferred to the market, or who have supported the launch of a new product or service. The award aims to highlight the relevance of standardisation on innovations’ long-term success and to recognise the achievements of experts and initiators in this area.

SMR was recognised specifically for leading an exceptionally successful standardisation process resulting in three new pre-standardisation documents that focus on City Resilience Development and contribute to standards at the international ISO level. The CEN Workshop Agreement titled CWA 17300 City Resilience Development – Operational Guidance defines an operational framework for cities, provides guidance on local resilience planning and supports their efforts in building resilience. The CWA 17301 Maturity Model allows evaluation of cities’ resilience performance, and the CWA 17302 Information Portal serves as a reference including information on cities’ local resilience.

The SMR project was also recognised as a Horizon 2020 Success Story.

For more information on the DIN Innovators Award win, click here.

Read more about the SMR project here.