Founded in 1990, INERIS is a public research institute, with industrial and commercial purposes, under the supervision of the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy. The mission of INERIS is to assess and prevent accidental and chronic risks to people and the environment generated by industrial activities, chemical substances and underground works. The various activities of INERIS consist of:
- Coordinating and participating in national and international research programmes related to risks and environment,
- Providing technical support to public authorities for drafting and implementing regulations and standards,
- Providing study and consultancy services on behalf of public authorities, industry and local/regional authorities,
- Developing methodological and decision support tools (guides, data bases…) and providing information and training for the economic and institutional stakeholders.
INERIS commitment in activities and related research on HSE essentially deal with:
- The characterization and understanding of the phenomena that govern the risks affecting safety or property of people, health and environment as a result of economic activities;
- The improvement of the identification and evaluation of such risks in order to enable decision makers in the public and private sectors to adopt the most appropriate measures to improve environmental safety.
INERIS has a vast experience in the evaluation of health and safety risks of products and processes, regulatory aspects and cost benefit evaluation. Two departments of INERIS (SUPP & DECI) will take part in the FLEDGED project.
- The SUPP department has a vast expertise for a variety of stakeholders on technological risks identification, evaluation, assessment and mitigation from hazardous substances detailed characterization up to qualification of process safety barriers.
- The DECI department includes activities related to the development and the use of predictive models of the behavior of pollutants in atmosphere, the management of data related to emission and concentration of pollutant in the environment and the set of economically-optimized strategies for emission reductions of pollutants (see for instance real time previsions of PREV’AIR (http://www2.prevair.org/) developed by INERIS in partnership with Meteo France.
Role in FLEDGED
INERIS will lead ‘Risk and Sustainability Analysis’ activities in the FLEDGED project. The main tasks of INERIS will be in the assessment of technological risk assessment and socio-economic impacts of the DME value chains.