"Donostia needs to be prepared to respond adequately to crises arising from climate change, social problems and dependencies between critical infrastructures", says the researcher of Tecnun, José María Sarriegi. With this objective in mind, the Smart Mature Resilience Project project was born three years ago, and is now in its final stretch. 

Its purpose is to develop, validate and implement tools that increase the resilience of cities in the face of climate change, social problems and dependencies between critical infrastructures. Results that the project partners have shared this week at the School of Engineers of the University of Navarra in San Sebastian. "We have closed the last details of the project, and we have made an internal balance of it," says Sarriegi, one of the project coordinators, along with Josune Hernantes and Leire Labaka.

The concept of resilience refers to the capacity of a system, in this case cities, to avoid suffering crises, to reduce their impact in the event of a crisis or to reduce the time and resources needed to return to normality after having suffered them.

Coordinated by the Department of Industrial Organization of Tecnun, and framed within the European Union's Horizon 2020 program, it has had the collaboration of 12 other partners, such as the Strategy Office of the City of San Sebastian, international universities and cities such as Glasgow (Scotland), Riga (Latvia), Bristol (England), Rome (Italy), Vejle (Denmark) and Kristiansand (Norway). "This is a clear commitment by the European Union to promote and develop resilience in large cities," says José María Sarriegi. 

"The main element of the project is a 'Maturity Model' that allows us to define various states that a city has to go through on its way to resilience," Sarriegi notes. 

A pioneering guide to resilience

One of the outcomes of the SMR Project is the development of the Resilience Roadmap, which aims to enable cities to withstand, absorb, respond to and recover from the effects of a crisis in a timely and efficient manner, as well as to plan how to preserve and/or restore critical infrastructure and essential functions.

Today, the importance of critical infrastructures (CIs) in ensuring the well-being of society is evident. "CIs provide citizens with water, energy, transportation, waste management, healthcare, education, and other basic services. Moreover, they are fundamental for life in modern cities and when they fail, human health, welfare and the economy are put at risk", as expressed by Cinta Lomba, researcher at Tecnun , in charge of developing this pioneering guide that will serve as a reference for other cities and which is financed by Ihobe, the Basque Government's public environmental management company.