ECHO’s Resilience Plan Evaluation
21st July 2026
The ECHO Project will develop a number of technological solutions to enhance urban resilience planning and management in Europe. The below blogpost by ECHO project partner the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) outlines the Resilience Plan Evaluation tool.
This week marks a turning point for European resilience: as of 17 July 2026, Member States are designating the critical entities that fall under the EU’s Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive. Thousands of infrastructure operators and municipalities across 11 essential sectors now face a clear duty: assess their risks, build a resilience plan, and prove they can keep essential services running through crises.
For many, that is a daunting, expert-heavy task. In the ECHO project, we are building something to change that. As part of the EU-funded ECHO project, the Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH), along with the expert guidance of University of Udine (UNIUD), is developing the Resilience Plan Evaluation tool. This is a Generative AI service that supports organisations in evaluating and improving the quality, completeness and maturity of their resilience plans, using internationally recognised resilience frameworks as reference points.
A key feature of the tool is its alignment with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the UNDRR Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient, and the UNDRR Principles for Resilient Infrastructure. Through the Sendai Framework, the tool reflects core disaster risk reduction priorities: understanding disaster risk, strengthening disaster risk governance, investing in resilience, and enhancing preparedness for effective response and recovery. This allows the evaluation to consider whether a resilience plan supports a shift from reactive emergency management towards proactive, risk-informed and prevention-oriented resilience planning.
The UNDRR Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient provide a city- and territory-level perspective, helping assess how a plan addresses governance, risk identification, financial capacity, resilient urban development, ecosystem protection, institutional capacity, societal engagement, infrastructure resilience, emergency preparedness, recovery and ‘build back better’ approaches.
At the infrastructure level, the evaluation also reflects the UNDRR Principles for Resilient Infrastructure: continuously learning, proactively protected, environmentally integrated, socially engaged, shared responsibility, and adaptively transforming. These principles help the tool move beyond a static assessment of plans and towards a practical understanding of how infrastructure systems can anticipate, absorb, recover from and adapt to shocks and stresses.
The output is not a generic checklist. The tool is being designed to provide a structured view of the current state of a resilience plan, highlight its alignment with recognised resilience criteria, and propose improvement strategies. These may include strengthening risk scenarios, improving data sharing, clarifying governance roles, addressing infrastructure interdependencies, integrating nature-based solutions, reinforcing community engagement, improving preparedness measures, or embedding lessons learned into future planning cycles.
CERTH is developing the Resilience Plan Evaluation tool with UNIUD, whose deep expertise in disaster risk reduction ensures the tool’s guidance is scientifically sound and firmly rooted in Sendai principles. The goal is simple: turn compliance from a box-ticking burden into a practical roadmap toward genuine, measurable resilience.
The Resilience Plan Evaluation tool is one of several interoperable tools that ECHO is co-creating with CI operators, emergency services and local authorities across Europe.
