About the Project
ECHO is an EU-funded project that aims to strengthen urban resilience planning and management in Europe.
As (peri-)urban areas become increasingly digital, interconnected and complex, alongside growing threats such as climate change, natural disasters and cyber-attacks, there is an urgent need to enhance the resilience and security of critical infrastructures (CIs) and the essential services they support.
The current state of resilience planning and management in Europe faces challenges due to its top-down strategies, which fail to account for specific local or regional needs and result in inadequate operational efficiency and fragmentation of key CI stakeholders and existing resources.
ECHO addresses these challenges by creating a multi-level Resilience Ecosystem that unites CI operators, Emergency Service Providers and local/regional authorities to co-create innovative tools, services and strategies for enhanced (urban) resilience planning and management. This will promote best practices and empower stakeholders of all sizes to strengthen the resilience of interconnected systems, ultimately enhancing the security and wellbeing of European citizens and communities.
The 3-year ECHO Project brings together 28 partners from 10 countries, including CI operators, local/regional authorities, Emergency Service Providers, researchers, universities, SMEs and enterprises. This multidisciplinary collaboration ensures that the ECHO solutions reflect the needs of different stakeholders and communities across the EU. The project is coordinated by Netcompany in Greece.
Project Objectives
The ECHO Project will:
- Develop a resilience Strategy, Information Sharing Protocol and an EU-sovereign Knowledge Hub to ensure cost-effective resource pooling, collaboration and efficient crisis response.
- Create a suite of interoperable, modular and cost-effective services accessible via a centralized Platform, including Generative AI tools for threat forecasting, risk assessment, situational awareness, decision support, resilience plan evaluation, and scenario-based simulations tailored to address diverse multi-hazard threats.
- Test and validate these ECHO solutions in four European pilot sites, addressing multiple hazards including floods, landslides, drought, earthquakes, wildfires, infrastructure failures and cyber-attacks.
- Foster collaboration amongst CI operators, Emergency Service Providers and local/regional authorities via local knowledge exchange and European workshops.
- Promote best practices through comprehensive impact-generation activities.
Contact The Project
For media queries, contact:
Dr Sean Travers
EU Project Manager, Carr Communications
stravers@carrcommunications.ie
For project related queries, contact:
Dr Paraskevas Bourgos
Project Coordinator, Netcompany