The European Union has chosen to concentrate its humanitarian demining strategy in support of the South Eastern Europe Stability Pact to remove the landmines and the unexploded ordnance that are the legacy of the recent Balkan conflict. To support this strategy, the European Commission has recommended a funding level of at least 180 MEuro for the period 2000-2006.

Experience has shown that large areas of infected countries that are suspected of containing landmines are, in fact, totally free of landmines. It is increasingly now the procedure, at the outset of a mine clearance campaign, to conduct a survey of such suspected areas and as soon as possible to conduct Level 2 Surveys in order to verify the suspicion or to confirm that the area is free of landmines. This approach has proved to be very effective in releasing large areas of ground for productive use relatively quickly (area reduction). The technologies used here are diverse and it is unlikely that one single technology will provide a universal solution. Current techniques use dogs (possibly combined with vapour trace collection), metal detectors and mechanical systems. For the near future some interesting solutions are being investigated ranging from vehicle-borne sensor platforms to advanced airborne and spaceborne systems. Urgent improvements to the conduct of Level 2 surveys and area reduction are needed, since as much as 80 % of the suspected areas finally turn out to be mine-free. Hence new methods for fast and reliable minefield delineation and area reduction have a tremendous impact on overall clearance efficiency, safety and restoration of socio-economic activity.
When the actual area that is infected with landmines has been delineated (minefield delineation) as a result of the Level 2 survey, the process switches to a slow, labour-intensive one in which close-in detection is followed by manual prodding and removal of the mines. At the present, the individual mines are detected primarily by using metal detectors. This technique is slow and the metal detector is plagued by false alarms generated by metallic debris such as bullets and shrapnel, each piece of which must be laboriously lifted by hand with the same care as if it were an actual mine. It is in this area of close-in detection that most of the European Commission's funding for R&D has been invested until now, because major improvements in the technologies are urgently required. Since 1998, 11 collaborative projects have been initiated with a commitment of about 15 MEuro with a comparable sum having been committed by the industrial partners. However, it appears that there is reluctance by industry to take the solutions from the demonstrator phase through to production. The reasons for this reluctance are widely recognised, the principal ones being the uncertainty of the prospective sales volume, the extensive and expensive trials required to prove the performance achieved and the very real risk that these trials will fail to confirm the original expectations of the user (deminer) community. The present study has addressed these central problems in detail and recommends a suite of actions to ensure that a reasonable path is created from R&D through to productionisation and deployment in the field. Besides the concern of ensuring continuity and constancy from R&D up to exploitation in humanitarian demining, the study also emphasises the need for supporting R&D in completely new technologies and new combinations of existing technologies, possibly borrowed from application domains other than humanitarian demining.

Runtime: 2000 - 2000