The University of Malta is one of five partners in a newly-launched €2.5 million project, SIMIT, funded by the Italia-Malta 2007-2013 Operational Programme, Strategic Projects. 

The SIMIT kick-off meeting was held recently at Agrigento, Sicily. The project falls under Priority Axis II (Environment, Energy and Risk Prevention) and will deal with the establishment of an integrated Civil Protection system for the Italo-Maltese cross-border area, focusing mainly on the handling of seismic risk. 

The project is led by the regional Civil Protection Department of Sicily, while the other four partners are the universities of Palermo and Catania, the Civil Protection Department of Malta and the University of Malta. The University of Malta will benefit from funding of €370,000, which will be shared among the Physics Department (Seismic Monitoring and Research Unit), the Construction and Management Unit and the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, the Faculty for the Built Environment and the Institute for Sustainable Development. 

The role of the Physics Department is to provide scientific input in the form of an improved real-time monitoring system for earthquakes in the Central Mediterranean, the evaluation of seismic hazard for the cross-border region and the numerical calculation of ground shaking scenarios in the event of a plausible earthquake.  

The Faculty for the Built Environment will be concerned mainly with developing methodologies for, and the evaluation of, the seismic vulnerability of local building stock.   Within this project, the University will considerably build upon its pool of geophysical equipment and seismic monitoring facilities, as well as hardware and software tools for studying the behaviour of local built structures under earthquake shaking, besides providing new opportunities for research.