The goal of the project is to support the resilience of the communities in war affected regions in Paestine and Ukraine.
The devastating wars in Palestine and Ukraine have severely disrupted higher education systems, hindering their continuity and regularity without compromising the minimum level of quality.
Universities face challenges such as damaged infrastructure, limited access to resources, and a lack of practical training opportunities for students. These challenges arise in parallel with other critical societal challenges such as urban resilience, including water management, energy sustainability, housing and sheltering, food security, and gender equity. This is even compounded by the limited skills needed to collect, analyze, manage and share field data, which are essential for any attempts seeking solutions for supporting community resilience.
The identified needs include training curricula, practical case studies, and FAIR data management to address urban resilience challenges in energy, housing, sheltering, food security, water, and gender equity. Collaboration with EU universities and partners through joint programs, mentorship, and capacity-building will help war-affected universities develop reconstruction strategies and support their communities. This engagement empowers higher education to tackle urgent challenges while reaffirming the EU’s commitment to education and peacebuilding.
In response to the urgent need for resilience in war-affected regions, FORWARD will develop an interdisciplinary online training program in urban resilience, targeting students and academics from relevant academic programs (e.g., urban planning, disaster management, engineering, information technology) as well as professionals from non-academic institutions and civil society organizations working in the field.
Participants
Project Consortium
EU Partner Universities
- Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) – Coordinator
- Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
- The Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund (SAIH)
- Polytechnic University of Milan (POLIMI)
Partner Universities in Palestine
- An-Najah National University (ANNU)
- The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)
Ukrainian Partner Universities
- Karazin Kharkiv National University (KKNU)
- Kyiv National Economic University (KNEU)
- Lviv Polytechnic National University (LPNU)
Associated Partners
- The Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU)
- The Gaza Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Platform (GUPAP)
More about the project
Background
Urban planning is a process aimed at providing social welfare and creating liveable environments for people living in urban settlements on a range of time scales. Urban settlements, especially those characterized by high population density and high resource consumption, typically exhibit complex interrelationships between dynamic social, economic, environmental, and political entities. They also involve landscapes considering a large variety of their ecosystems and resources, mainly water and fuel/ energy supplies.
Conflicts usually occur over and for resources (usually natural resources), especially when these resources are very limited in an area with extreme needs and demands for these resources. Damage in specific resources such as water, fuel, forests, agricultural lands, and extensive vegetation damage in urban spaces in conflict times and areas are enough to bring some fragile communities to limits of their resilience. Whether it is political conflicts, administrative failures, natural events or environmental changes, with limited resources cities are quickly plunged into deep crises.
The destruction of water infrastructure and other basic resources further embeds social inequalities, preventing marginalized communities or groups (such as women and children in some communities) from having equal access to resources (e.g. clean water), and leaving them suffering from different kinds of diseases due to the contamination of drinking water. In such cases, urban resilience is the concept that describes the potential of cities and urban societies to react to disturbances and processes of change as flexibly and robustly as possible. Urban resilience addresses multidimensionality and complexity and engages multiple stakeholders due to its multidisciplinary nature. It enhances the ability of cities, their surrounding landscapes and communities to withstand disturbances and reshape the complex relationships between infrastructural, social, economic, environmental, and institutional dimensions.
This requires applying innovative approaches that call for a multidimensional dynamic process among stakeholders aiming to prepare for urban development strategies and prioritize resilient urban environments to reduce urban vulnerabilities by building functioning systems and processes that can withstand, adapt, and recover from external and internal disturbances quickly and effectively. These approaches should emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement based on field studies of specific real cases, and collaboration across borders and among stakeholders. Besides, in crisis situations, it becomes critical to facilitate collaboration among stakeholders, to address barriers such as limited access to data and fragmentation of efforts during emergencies, as well as to promote transparency, accessibility, inclusive and ethical data management and sharing to improve Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse (FAIR) of digital data and to ensure timely and equitable responses.
Objectives
To meet the identified needs, in FORWARD, we set the following specific objectives:
- Rebuild and Strengthen Higher Education Systems in War Regions
- Improve Digital Access and Tools
- Promote Open Science and Ethical Data Practices
- Address Urban Resilience Challenges
- Promote Equity and Gender Inclusivity
- Build Capacity for Sustainability
- Foster Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Training Modules and Case Studies
Guided by requirements assessments and local stakeholder engagement, the project will develop, integrate into local curricula, and implement six training modules in open science and urban resilience addressing critical areas in
- open science
- water
- energy
- housing and sheltering
- food security
- gender equity
Alongside, the project will design and implement 40 practical case studies.
These efforts will equip over 200 participants with essential skills in data collection, FAIR data management, practical fieldwork, and urban resilience and planning.
Training will employ a cloud-based platform featuring a data repository and e-learning system, incorporating tools such as VR to simulate real-world scenarios.
Expected Results and Impact
FORWARD will provide open-access resources, including OERs and MOOCs through the e-learning platform, along with urban resilience datasets aligned with FAIR principles, which will be uploaded to the project’s data repository for use beyond the project’s duration.
FORWARD expands its impact by engaging over 550 stakeholders through:
- Six major stakeholder workshops
- Two webinars
- A final conference
- A stakeholder network to foster collaboration
The outcomes will serve as scalable models for strengthening resilience in higher education and urban systems in other war regions and for global adaptation.
