The NERIS roadmap: research challenges in emergency preparedness, response and recovery

NERIS as a European Platform on Preparedness for Nuclear and Radiological Emergency Response and Recovery (EPR&R) has developed a roadmap setting out the key research challenges for radiation emergency preparedness, response and recovery. Research projects in this field have been summarised to demonstrate how important areas of development have been identified and addressed. Radiation EPR&R has a continuous need to evolve to meet societal demands, but also to keep pace with scientific and technological developments and opportunities and so the NERIS research priorities as published in the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) are kept under review. Three challenge areas have been identified covering the topics of radiological impact assessment, protective action strategies and establishing a transdisciplinary and inclusive framework for emergency preparedness, response and recovery. The importance of these challenge areas and the underlying key topics for NERIS have been mapped across to the Joint Radiation Protection Roadmap developed by the consortium of European radiation research platforms known as MEENAS. The war in Ukraine triggered a new round of revision of the SRA that resulted in the identification of four topics as new or revised challenges for the NERIS community. These updated challenges are: (1) optimisation of management strategies for the transition and recovery phase, (2) uncertainty quantification, data assimilation and monitoring strategies, (3) inverse modelling, and (4) lessons identified from Ukraine and implications for emergency preparedness. These four areas will form the priority research areas for the NERIS community to help advance radiation emergency preparedness to meet current challenges and needs that have been identified.