Given the current risk landscape in Europe and globally, it is no surprise that preparedness is now a key concept highlighted throughout the policy and crisis planning agendas of European authorities. Disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity, trajectories for meeting climate change commitments and targets are largely off course, regional and global political tensions are the highest since the Cold War, and we are still recovering from arguably the most disruptive pandemic of our lifetimes. What is more, these crises do not take place in isolation. Some now use the term polycrisis, to describe a complex entanglement of risks and crisis across different systems. This can lead to cascading and multiplying effects of the impacts more severe than for an isolated crisis. In SYNERGIES, we consider these cascading incidents, such as flooding and sequential industrial hazard scenarios played out in the Rotterdam harbour, potentially requiring coordination among many different actors with complications in crisis communications, volunteer efforts, etc. Outside of the project, one can consider how ongoing conflicts alongside climate extremes (e.g. droughts) have combined impacts on the economy and our costs-of-living owing to inflation in energy and food sectors.
To meet these challenges, preparedness now sits at the forefront of the broader societal resilience agenda in Europe. The Preparedness Union Strategy was officially launched in March 2025, by the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS), as a comprehensive plan to strengthen the EU’s ability to anticipate, prevent, and respond to a wide range of crises including natural hazards, climate-related events, cybersecurity risks, hybrid threats, health emergencies, conflicts, and other emerging risks. The Strategy promotes an all-hazards, whole-of-government, and whole-of-society approach in which disaster preparedness is shared across public authorities, the private sector, communities, civil society, and multiple policy domains. It outlines coordinated measures such as strategic foresight, early warning, and risk assessment, strengthening the resilience of critical infrastructure, essential services, and supply chains, enhancing public awareness and preparedness, improving public–private and civil–military cooperation, and reinforcing collaboration with non-EU partners.
March (2026) marks the 1-year anniversary since the adoption of the Strategy, and since its launch we see different sectors, countries, and the larger European policy ecosystems taking up the call on preparedness. This month alone, Brussels has been buzzing with various high-level preparedness events. A conference organised by the European Parliament focused on European Resilience in the Face of Systemic Crisis: Towards a Shared Doctrine and Information Capability, to examine how Europe can better anticipate, coordinate, and respond to cross-border crises. The European Citizens’ Panel on Preparedness hosted three days of discussions on preparedness together with 150 randomly selected EU citizens, 50 journalists and influencers, policymakers from the European Commission, and various experts. The EU Preparedness Conference set the upcoming preparedness priorities for EC following the 1-year mark of the Preparedness Union Strategy. Europe’s Climate Action Community gathered hundreds of participants and members for the Climate Pact’s annual event ‘Together in Action 2026’, a celebration marking progress in tackling climate change and the drive towards a cleaner and resilient Union. And the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) hosted a joint workshop, bringing together ECDC Management Board members and National Focal Points to discuss the status of Public Health Emergency Preparedness Assessments (PHEPA) being conducted across EU/EEA countries.
These were just the latest events on the SYNEGIES radar, certainly there were others. Fortunately, our partner Vrije University Amsterdam had an opportunity to participate in several of these events, and has been active in similar discussions taking place in partner countries (see e.g. the Netherlands). Among the many points of attention raised across these events, there are three which are particularly relevant to the work we do in the SYNERGIES project.
Preparedness is everyone’s responsibility
A central focus of the Preparedness Union Strategy is on population preparedness. One of the key messages here is that authorities cannot help every individual immediately, and therefore the resilience of a community also depends on the preparedness of each individual. This is promoted through risk awareness-raising programmes and campaigns, preparedness education curriculums for youth, and around recommendations to the population for a 72-hour self-sufficiency kits (see e.g. here). In the coming months, SYNEGIES partners will be publishing several solutions and papers related to these measures. This includes a training module for educators by Save the Children Italy, and a study steered by the University of Tartu which proposes a comparative framework for preparedness education programmes for children. Vrije University Amsterdam will also be publishing a perspective paper showing how countries across Europe have implemented the recommendations for the 72-hour self-sufficiency kits. In this regard, it has been noted how household resilience is important, but such measures must also embrace more inclusive, whole-of-society planning for improving population preparedness, by addressing underlying vulnerabilities, investing in local resilience approaches that integrate local knowledge and networks, and meaningfully involving residents in preparedness and decision-making processes. Indeed, when it comes to involving everyone in a meaningful way, SYERGIES will also be producing several solutions including a Tabletop game on guidelines for better integrating spontaneous volunteers in preparedness actions.
All-hazards preparedness requires engagement across sectors
The call for an all-hazards approach to preparedness highlights the need for governance and technical systems to coordinate and integrate knowledge, policies, data etc., for addressing different types of risk. As noted earlier, risks do not operate in isolation and therefore require systemic approaches across sector and risk silos. One crucial intersection where this applies is between Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risks Reduction (DRR), where increasingly it can be seen the risk of climate-related hazards (e.g. floods, wildfires) interacting with other hazard types (industrial accidents, blackouts). In the coming months, the Societal Resilience Cluster (SRC) will publish a joined set of policy recommendations around this topic, stemming from the research of 13 EU-Horizon funded projects including SYNERGIES. The recommendation will point to key actions to help strengthen collaboration across governance levels, align policy frameworks, incentives, and accountability mechanisms, and to reinforce adaptive and inclusive CCA/DRR governance that enables whole-of-society resilience. Importantly, and regarding the last point, it needs to be noted that “all-hazards” approaches should still remain sensitive to hazard- and context-specific vulnerabilities by grounding capacity developments in scenario-based social vulnerability assessments. This recommendation stems directly from work done in SYNERGIES and the development of our Preparedness Assessment Tool, which enables crisis management actors use simple proxies to identify, target, and monitor gaps in preparedness (e.g. around governance, communication, etc.) vis-à-vis different at-risk groups within local contexts.
Turning urgency into opportunity
Sitting in the many preparedness events and discussions over the past year, together with European residents, authorities, media, (essential) businesses, researchers and others, it becomes clear that we are all very much aware of the growing risks facing Europe. Despite the daily differences, the common understanding is that the norm has shifted and that there is a growing urgency to unite and work together to ensure a more prepared and resilient Europe. This sense of urgency is at times overwhelming, and it can be undermined in different ways, for instance from the onslaught of mis/dis-information, or weakened trust and engagement dynamics between governments and the population.
However, this urgency is also the motivating factor which helps to inspire research, innovation, community engagement, participatory governance, individual preparedness, in the direction of effective crisis resilience. It pushes us to reflect, to recognise vulnerabilities and to learn from past mistakes, to better anticipate what’s to come, and to plan for a stronger and more united society and Union. To paraphrase recent remarks at the EU Preparedness Conference from Commissioner Hadja Lahbib, “preparedness is not just another policy, it is a way of thinking … and it must become second nature”. This should not alarm us but rather help us to recognise the opportunity to strengthen our own resilience and to build something together. A robust preparedness strategy is the sum of its parts, and each step we take as individuals, communities, member states, research projects, EU institutions and policy makers, is an opportunity to build this.
European Citizens’ Panel on Preparedness © European Union, 2026
