Civil Defence and Emergency Preparedness
FOI is involved with crisis preparedness and issues of safety and security from many perspectives and together with many different actors ranging from municipalities at the local level through partners at regional and national level to European and international agencies. The crisis management system is of central importance and its development is an area in which FOI provides comprehensive support. For example FOI works closely with the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, the National Food Agency and the Swedish Energy Agency as well as with many local authorities. The Swedish Government Offices are also among FOI's clients in this area.
Studying security from an overall perspective is very important since issues of dependency and communication are fundamental when it comes to proposing structures for coordinated action between organisations, understanding the roles and responsibilities of the actors in the food supply chain, identifying means of supporting the County Administrative Boards in their role in the system, assessing the consequences of a range of different crises, reducing the vulnerability of the energy system or improving command and control – these are just some of the areas in which FOI is engaged.
FOI's expert knowledge covers, for example, energy and other infrastructure systems, the functioning of crisis management systems and a wide variety of threats and risks, as well as methods of dealing with these issues. Examples of the latter include risk and vulnerability analysis, exercises, evaluation, problem formulation, policy analysis and the facilitation of groups. This is a field in which FOI also has an extensive, technically-oriented knowledge base.