The second edition of the “Project to policy kick off seminar” (P2PKOS) was organised on 22-23 March by the European Commission Research Executive Agency. The seminar brought together policy makers from DG Home, DG Connect, DG Move, ERA, ENISA and 33 EU projects funded under the Horizon 2020 Secure societies call which started in 2020.
The SAFETY4RAILS project took part in this event as a representative of the group of the new projects in Infrastructure Protection.
The first day focussed on dissemination, exploitation and communication within EU research projects: what should be done in case of crisis, how to increase the impact of the communication in projects as well as presentation of available EC tools for communication such as the Horizon Results Platform or Horizon Results Boosters (available at https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/projects-results;programCode=H2020).
On the second day, in both plenary and groups sessions, representatives from H2020 security projects shared the objectives of the projects and identified ways they could contribute to the European Commission policy on both physical and cybersecurity of critical infrastructure
Marie-Hélène Bonneau (UIC, International Union of railways) provided a brief presentation on S4R. She underlined that the European Commission has proposed recently the revision of the Network Information Security Directive (NIS2) as well as a proposal for a directive on the resilience of critical entities (CER). The scope and the objectives of SAFETY4RAILS are fully in line with the CER and NIS2 directive proposals and the tools delivered therein will help rail and metro operators to implement the requirements of both CER and NIS Directives at national level.
This seminar was a great opportunity to bridge the gap between security research and policies. Moreover, synergies with other related ongoing projects such as S4Allcities dealing with resilience of smart cities against cyber–physical risks could be also very promising.
