Resilience

The frequency and severity of impacts of disaster and crises events has channelled attention to vulnerability of physical assets, with a particular focus on Critical Infrastructure (CI). Due to the dependency on these infrastructures, disruptions to the normal operation, or the removal/ suspension of CI services would significantly affect public safety, security, economic activity or environmental quality in developed societies. A breakdown in any one of these assets alone can bring about catastrophic consequences. Furthermore owing to systems interdependencies, the cascading effects potentially resulting from the breakdown in one system on other interconnected systems are of significant concern. With the knowledge of the consequences of such CI failures, and owing to the high number of possible natural or anthropogenic threat events potentially facing CI, there is a clear need to identify, develop and operationalise Resilience approaches and methods to assist CI stakeholders in preparing for/mitigating, responding to and recovering from likely disaster events.

With this challenge in mind, The RESILENS consortium (which includes a number of CI providers, operators and municipal regional authorities with significant levels of experience in the application of resilience), aims to deliver enhanced concepts in resilience and risk management that will have the capabilities to address crises and disasters and how they affect CI.

The primary aim of the RESILENS project is to develop a user-friendly, citizen centric European Resilience Management Guideline which is founded in the principles of risk management and vulnerability reduction and which will, through its uptake and interactive qualities, lead to clear, coherent and effective crises and disaster resilience management for CI, thus contributing to more resilient and secure economic and societal systems.