ECHO’s First EU Workshop
5th May 2026
On 18th March 2026, ECHO held its first European workshop in Malaga, Spain. This workshop built upon the insights from ECHO’s previous local workshops in each of the project’s pilot regions – Slovenia, Spain and Italy– in which current practices, key challenges and opportunities for improving resilience management were identified. The EU workshop moved beyond these local perspectives to analyse shared weaknesses across these pilot regions, understand their underlying causes and identify opportunities for improvement. The local insights were connected with a wider, cross-border perspective, with the overall aim being to form a critical foundation for the development of the ECHO Resilience Strategy. The Strategy will help peri-urban and urban areas prepare for, respond to and recover from multi-hazard challenges affecting infrastructures by supporting more integrated, collaborative and long-term approaches to resilience planning and management.
The findings from the local workshops were also validated and discussed, in order to confirm whether the main organisational weaknesses identified in Slovenia, Italy and Spain are likewise recognized by a broader group of stakeholders, as well as to further explore underlying causes that may point to systemic issues and potential solutions. In addition, the workshop provided a structured setting to examine resilience across administrative and geographic boundaries, including cross-city, cross-municipality, cross-region, and cross-country dimensions.
Stakeholders from different countries and backgrounds attended the EU workshop. Participants included authorities at national, regional and local levels, including representatives from civil protection, Critical Infrastructure operators and Emergency Service Providers across several critical sectors, and other relevant stakeholders. This diversity ensured that the findings reflect not only operational perspectives of Critical Infrastructure operators and Emergency Service Providers, but also governance, emergency response and community-level insights, all of which are essential for strengthening the resilience of essential services across Europe.
The workshop discussions were organised around two topics. The first topic was the four categories of weakness that had repeatedly emerged across Slovenia, Italy and Spain. The weaknesses were challenges related to 1) governance and decision-making, 2) the management of risks and knowledge, 3) planning and land use in long-term resilience, and 4) the capacities required to ensure preparedness, training, societal involvement and continuity of operations. The second topic was aspects of resilience across administrative and geographic boundaries, exploring knowledge, planning, resources and ‘team’, the last of which refers to cooperation amongst stakeholders. These discussion topics enabled the workshop participants to connect their local and national realities with wider European needs, which generated concrete input for the ECHO resilience strategy.
Discussions concluded that the most significant resilient gaps are: fragmented and insufficiently actionable knowledge; reactive planning rather than preventative and life-cycle oriented planning; a lack of coordination; inaccessible resources; structurally overstretched individuals and organisations; and underdeveloped community and social dimensions of resilience. These gaps reveal a set of recurring patterns in deeper structural misalignments across knowledge, decision-making, operations, and stakeholder involvement. They also highlight that improving resilience is not primarily about adding new elements but about connecting and operationalising what already exists. From this perspective, the workshop identified a set of cross-cutting action priorities. The first of which is structuring, sharing and translating data into usable insights via common standards, interoperable systems and mechanisms that turn complex information into decision-support outputs that can be used consistently across organisations. The other recommendations included life-cycle resilience; operational alignment; shared resource systems; system-supported performance; and resilience systems that systematically includes diverse stakeholders and reflects different needs and capacities.
The ECHO project contributes to these priorities at both operational and systemic levels. The ECHO tools and services support stakeholders in practice by enabling improved knowledge use, resource management, decision-making, and coordination. In parallel, the ECHO Resilience Strategy provides a structured basis to embed these priorities into governance, planning processes, and long-term resilience development and investment decisions, supporting their sustained adoption and scaling. The EU workshop in Malaga represented a key step in achieving these goals.
