Fire Safe Europe
15 Mar 2023
On 15 March, the European Commission published the “Transition Pathway for Construction”, a vision on how to ensure a swift green and digital transition for this crucial ecosystem.
The transition pathway for construction aims to offer a bottom-up understanding of the scale, cost, and conditions for resilience, competitiveness, the green and digital transition. These conditions are translated into an actionable plan whose success depends on the EU, its Member States, regional and local governments, industry, academia, and citizens.
The High Level Construction Forum (HLCF) has been the vehicle for the co-creation of the transition pathway. It includes over 700 members (companies, industry associations, Member States, academia and other stakeholders). The transition pathway is based on six building blocks:
Competitiveness
Skills and talent
Enabling framework
Research, Innovation and Technology
Funding
Towards a fair and safe built environment
The importance of fire safety is recognised in “Building Block 6: Towards a fair and safe built environment” describing initiatives supporting a fair, quality, and safe built environment. In particular, the transition pathway underlines that cross-fertilisation of experiences, knowledge and best practices can make a big difference in improving the fire safety of the built environment all over Europe. The green and digital transitions will mean the use of new materials, products, and technologies. These new approaches bring along also new types of risks, and at the same time the experience and knowledge base for these novel solutions is thin. This is what the Fire Information Exchange Platform (FIEP) can help the twin transitions and to be successful it needs broad participation both from regulatory and non-regulatory perspectives, and open discussion about the success stories as well as challenges encountered.
Finally, the transition pathway acknowledges Fire Safe Europe as one of the stakeholders committing to roadmaps and initiatives for resilience, greening and digitalisation: “A very active partner of FIEP (EC's Fire Information Exchange Platform), Fire Safe Europe, has a network of experts and stakeholders exchanging good practice towards fire safety. Fire Safe Europe provides evidence for the need to improve Fire Safety (estimates 5000 fires, 11 fatalities and 190 hospitalisations a day in Europe, which represent 1% of our EU GDP ''burning'')”.
The full document is available here