Spotlight on: EU Preparedness – Projects reinforcing Europe’s resilience in a changing world

Europe is entering a new era of preparedness, with natural and man-made crises becoming more frequent and complex. Ranging from health emergencies and climate hazards to technological disruptions and geopolitical shocks, the EU is reshaping how it anticipates, manages and reacts to threats.  

“New realities require a new level of preparedness in Europe. Our citizens, our Member States, and our businesses need the right tools to act both to prevent crises and to react swiftly when a disaster hits.” 

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission  

In March 2025, the European Commission launched the EU Preparedness Union Strategy, a blueprint for preventing and responding to emerging risks through an integrated all-hazards, whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach. This is part of a broader vision, where preparedness is treated as a shared European responsibility requiring stronger coordination, scientific collaboration and societal engagement. However, as Commissioner Lahbib recently stated, there is no “one size fits all” approach and all countries face their specific challenges. European preparedness should therefore adapt to these specificities.  

By managing eight major EU funding programmes across areas of health, digital, industry and space, the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) supports projects that strengthen the Union’s resilience and capacity to respond to whatever crisis comes next.  

Seen as a whole, the projects featured in this article demonstrate how Europe’s resilience emerges from many interconnected efforts, each one strengthening a part of the system advancing EU preparedness. 

Situational awareness and crisis intelligence 

Europe’s ability to prepare for crises begins with understanding them early. Conflicts, extreme weather and food insecurity increasingly drive large-scale population movements. THEIA tackles this challenge by blending satellite data, non-space information and Geospatial AI to detect anomalies, map evolving risks and support real-time decision-making. 

Delivered through a cloud platform ready for integration into Copernicus Security Services, THEIA empowers EU actors such as SatCen, Frontex and national defence authorities with timely and operational intelligence. By reinforcing Europe’s independent Earth observation capacity, it builds a foundational layer of preparedness: the ability to see crises before they escalate. 

Secure digital networks for resilient healthcare 

Anticipating crises is only the first step, systems must also continue functioning when disruptions occur. In Oulu, Finland, HaDEA supports a European first: a private 5G network embedded in a hospital, designed for mission-critical medical operations. Hola 5G Oulu creates a secure, high-capacity communication environment that enables: 

• Real-time patient monitoring through wireless wearables;
• Remote surgical guidance;
• Faster access to clinical data;
• Improved cybersecurity for health information. 

By modernising digital infrastructure, the project strengthens the continuity and efficiency of care, even under crisis conditions. It also sets a replicable model for hospitals across Europe, ensuring that digital innovation directly reinforces health system resilience. 

Strengthening the resilience of critical (utility) systems 

AI can complement and augment human abilities in the management of critical systems, making them more resilient, safe and secure. AI4REALNET is developing new AI algorithms to support human management of electricity, railway, and air traffic. The project builds on: 

• AI algorithms mainly composed by supervised and reinforcement learning;
• Human-in-the-loop decision making for co-learning between AI and humans;
• Autonomous AI systems relying on human supervision. 

The AI4REALNET framework will be tested in six use cases driven by industry requirements across three types of network infrastructures. These cases address key operator challenges like decarbonisation, digitalisation and resilience using a unified setup that allows different AI and non-AI solutions to be applied and compared. 

Information integrity 

Crises also affect the information space, where misinformation can undermine public trust and response efforts. BECID2 focuses on strengthening resilience to disinformation in the Baltics through a multi-layered approach: 

• Macro level: collaboration between fact-checkers, media, researchers and policymakers;
• Societal level: targeted media literacy campaigns for underserved groups;
• Individual level: strengthening media and information literacy, digital literacy and critical thinking. 

The project makes use of AI-supported verification tools, open-source intelligence methods and dedicated actions against gendered and health-related misinformation. 

Health preparedness 

As part of the EU Preparedness Union Strategy, a new Union prevention, preparedness and response plan for health crises was launched in November 2025. The plan outlines the EU's health crisis governance framework, covering all phases of the crisis management cycle. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of anticipating threats and being ready to react quickly and effectively when crises strike. By linking national and EU efforts better, today’s Union Plan gives us a solid set of tools to prepare for, prevent and respond to health crisis more robustly. This will help to manage impacts, protect people and support recovery.” 

Olivér Várhelyi, Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare  

Under the EU4Health and Horizon Europe Health programme, HaDEA manages many projects advancing health crisis preparedness. 

Long-term systemic readiness and research coordination 

Beyond immediate threats, Europe must invest in the structures that enable sustained preparedness. BE READY has built the foundation for a future European partnership on pandemic preparedness by aligning EU, national and regional research agendas. 

Key achievements include: 

• Creating the Pandemic Preparedness and Response Observatory;
• Establishing a shared Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda;
• Setting up coordination mechanisms linking the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the European Medicines Agency and global partners. 

With 24 organisations from 15 countries, BE READY ensures Europe advances towards a coherent, One Health-based research landscape capable of anticipating and addressing emerging biological threats. 

The project’s activities will be continued by the recently launched BE READY NOW European Partnership on Pandemic Preparedness. The Partnership aims to enhance the EU's preparedness for predicting and responding to emerging infectious health threats, by:  

1)  Improving the coordination of funding for research and innovation at the EU, national and regional levels;  

2) Strengthening the readiness of the research ecosystem, including networks of “ever-warm” research sites and infrastructures that can be quickly activated in case of any emerging health threats.  

BE READY NOW will also launch joint transnational calls to support interdisciplinary research on pandemic preparedness.  

Rapid production of vaccines in emergencies 

When crises strike, preparedness depends on the ability to act fast. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a critical vulnerability: Europe lacked ready-to-activate manufacturing capacity for vaccines.  
The EU has committed a significant €160 million on an annual basis towards addressing this gap, underpinning annual contracts that fall under a comprehensive framework agreement set to span from 2023 to 2031, the EU FAB network. These contracts are strategically designed to maintain operational flexibility within a network of vaccine manufacturers.  

The EU FAB framework contracts established a network of ‘ever-warm’ vaccine manufacturing companies located in the EU to ensure that sufficient and agile manufacturing capacities for different vaccine types are kept operational during the so-called preparedness phase, the period between public health emergencies. The aim is to ensure that in the initial phase of a public health emergency sufficient manufacturing capacities are available before industry has scaled up their own production. Priority rights for the reserved capacity are also part of the contract. 

Medical countermeasures, stockpiles and technology innovation 

One of the mandates of the EU and HERA is to ensure the availability and accessibility of the medical countermeasures (MCMs) needed to respond to health crisis. To strengthen every link in the MCMs’ chain, from research to deployment, HaDEA has signed 11 EU4Health grants worth €158 million¹ in 2025 to advance the implementation of HERA’s crisis-preparedness mandate. 

A flagship project in this area is the European Vaccine Hub, a new EU platform uniting top research institutions and manufacturers to coordinate vaccine R&D, develop pandemic-prototype vaccines and accelerate the path from clinical trials to scalable production.   

The other 10 MCMs EU4Health grants and joint actions also markedly reinforce Europe’s long-term ability to anticipate and respond to future health emergencies:  

• Two grants will bring next-generation respiratory protection to the market;
• Five others will modernise pharmaceutical manufacturing for cleaner and faster scale-up of medicine production;
• One grant will advance broad-spectrum antiviral mRNA technologies;
• A grant to Africa CDC will boost Mpox testing and sequencing capacities in Africa by:  

• Bringing next-generation respiratory protection to market (two projects: Easy2reUse and 2G_PROVEIL); 

• Modernising pharmaceutical manufacturing for cleaner and faster scale-up of medicine production (five projects: InnoManContiMod; RoboPharma; SPEEDCELL; PharmSD 3.0; SmartNEBI), and   

• Advancing broad-spectrum antiviral mRNA technologies (one project: NoVir);
• In addition, the Joint Action STOCKPILE focuses on strategic planning of EU-level MCMs reserves and deployment in times of crisis. 

Discover more about HaDEA-managed EU-funding programmes:

• Connecting Europe Facility - European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
• Digital Europe Programme - European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
• EU4Health - European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
• Horizon Europe - European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)