Emergency Management involving Critical Infrastructure Disruptions: operationalizing the deployment of resilience capabilities

Recent developments nurturing the importance of Emergency Management (EM) of Critical Infrastructure (CI) brought a shift of emphasis from protecting the systems to building resilience. Resilience approach is required to cope with inevitable events, ensuring ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event. The study proposes a novel approach to integrating the resilience capacities of CI into the EM cycle, which facilitates emergency services and CI operators to collaborate in addressing resilience improvement measures, while planning to cope with CI disruptions. It grounds on a previously published comprehensive framework which reflects the main characteristics of such emergencies (e.g. interdependent, multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder) and supports the identification, assessment and development of specific technical and organizational capabilities. A pilot application is provided on a real case involving the public and private actors engaged in the Regional Programme on Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience (CIP-R) in Lombardy (Italy).