Bridging Governance for Resilient Futures: a New European Policy Brief

Europe’s risk landscape is changing in ways that are harder to separate into neat categories. Floods trigger transport disruptions. Heatwaves compound droughts. Geopolitical shocks interact with climate-driven extremes. Managing these interconnected risks requires something different from what most governance systems currently offer.

That’s the starting point for Bridging Governance for Resilient Futures, a new policy brief developed collectively by 12 Horizon Europe projects under the Societal Resilience Cluster (SRC), facilitated by CMINE (the Crisis Management Innovation Network Europe). MIRACA is proud to be one of those contributors.

The core argument

Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) have too long operated in separate institutional worlds — different time horizons, different ministries, different vocabularies — even though the risks they manage are deeply intertwined. The brief sets out a concrete governance roadmap to close that gap, built around three priorities:

1. Strengthening coordination across governance levels: moving beyond information exchange to institutionalised mechanisms for joint planning and collective action, from European institutions to local communities.

2. Aligning policy frameworks, incentives, and accountability mechanisms: harmonised reporting, shared risk concepts, integrated data platforms, and durable institutional arrangements that outlast individual projects.

3. Fostering inclusive and adaptive governance: integrating local knowledge and community capacities, and building systems flexible enough to adapt as risks continue to evolve.

Where MIRACA fits

MIRACA’s work on multi-hazard risk assessment of critical infrastructure sits squarely at the intersection of all three priorities. We generate the kind of evidence that integrated governance systems need; modelling how compound events and cascading impacts interact across sectors and scales. But evidence alone is not enough. The brief’s call for interoperable data standards, shared risk assessments, and coordinated planning reflects the same challenge we encounter in every stakeholder engagement: translating technical research into decisions people can act on.

We’re glad to have contributed to this collective effort, and we encourage policymakers, practitioners, and fellow researchers to read the brief and engage with its recommendations.

Read the full policy brief: Bridging Governance for Resilient Futures