Cross-border impacts on networks due to natural hazards

Incidents involving networks delivering essential services to society across two or more countries are witnessed in the everyday life of citizens whenever exceptional weather conditions disrupt transport, power or network and information systems close to a border. Yet it proved to be more difficult than initially envisaged to compile a list of major transboundary incidents informed by official and reliable sources. It proved equally challenging to account for current examples of governance arrangements providing joint assistance to population, businesses, and services across borders in Europe. The study makes an effort to provide first a conceptual framework for defining cross-border impacts, building on existing classifications of interdependencies and types of impacts available in literature. It then illustrates risk assessment and management methods and discusses the need to complement the latter with a resilience approach. Reasons for embracing resilience thinking are the increasing complexity of networks and the environment in which they operate, the dynamicity of both threats and systemic vulnerability of those and of sectors that depend on them for their own functioning. Because of such complexity and dynamicity not all threats, failures and impacts can be fully envisaged and anticipated. Therefore, avoiding catastrophic modes of failure and recovering in the smoothest possible way, which are the essence of resilience, become key concerns for utilities' providers and for society at large. In the last section of this report, future pathways are proposed in the search of risk and resilience assessment and management tools better in line with multi-hazard and multi-risk understandings. On the governance side, the recommendations of an OECD report on enhanced governance of CIs are re-elaborated through the transboundary lenses. This study makes a first timely contribution to the very recent policy development at the EU level: the Directive on the Resilience of Critical Entities (CER) and the Directive on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2). The former address safety and security aspects of CIs in a systemic manner, whilst the latter focuses on network and information systems that have become increasingly vital for all other CIs and for a very large number of services and economic activities globally.