Planning for territorial resilience

May 2023

The last blog post (Opens in a new window) focused on understanding different types of resilience to be better prepare for unexpected events. It differentiated between infrastructure / technical, economic, social / cultural, ecosystem and governance resilience and different levels of governance and in different types of territories.

These types of resilience rely heavily on territorial governance capacities, including knowledge management, self-organisation, willingness to adapt and try to understand intrinsically complex coupled social–ecological–economic systems. It also requires decision-making in which costs and benefits are separated by very long time-lags and look at global collective goods that go beyond the scope of unilateral ‘single-best efforts’ of any player.

Still, the question remains how to plan for resilience in different types of places.

Improving regional preparedness

Identifying the most relevant areas of potential sources of regional vulnerability is a critical step in building resilience in regions. Some steps that can be taken to identify these areas include:

• Conduct a risk assessment. A comprehensive risk assessment can help to identify potential sources of vulnerability in a region. This can include assessing risks from natural disasters, economic downturns, pandemics, and other potential sources of disruption. The ESPON tool to territorial impact assessment (Opens in a new window) can be a first step for assessing a regional vulnerabilities and risks.