Strategies and Technologies for United and Resilient Critical Infrastructures and Vital Services in Pandemic-Stricken Europe

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of the continuity of vital services, has shown the need to work together for the common good. It has proven that a pandemic is not only a health crisis and that it does not only disrupt Critical Infrastructures (CIs), but that there is an extremely important link between the resilience of CIs and our societies. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to jointly ‘build back better’ with the focus on sustainability and green recovery.

SUNRISE will facilitate active collaboration of CIs across Europe to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. By Q3/2025, this collaboration will result in a new stable working group for resilience to pandemics with at least 100 members.

With a group of 4 CI authorities, 16 CI operators, 3 other CI stakeholders, 4 experts in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2 experts in epidemiology and climate extremes, and 12 security researchers and SW developers, we will: (1) Identify pandemic-specific vital services and CIs, their dependencies, risks, cascading effects, and effective measures to tackle them at European level. (2) Develop a comprehensive strategy (TRL8) and four innovative tools (TRL7) ensuring greater availability, reliability, security, robustness, trustworthiness, cost-effectiveness, climate-friendliness, and continuity of pandemic-specific vital services in Europe: Tools for risk-based access control, resource demand prediction and management, cyber-physical resilience, and remote infrastructure inspection. (3) Pilot the results in operational environments of the CIs while tackling some of their biggest pain points exposed by the current pandemic. (4) Promote our approach across Europe to ensure a united front and resilience of CIs to pandemics.

We will carefully consider legal, ethical, societal, economic, and climate aspects, ensuring that our results address not only the needs of the CIs, but also those of our society.