ECHO is a three-year EU-funded project that builds a pan-European, multi-level Resilience Ecosystem to help cities and regions anticipate, withstand, and recover from complex, interconnected threats. It focuses on safeguarding both legally defined critical infrastructures and often-overlooked essential service providers that keep urban and peri-urban communities functioning. The project brings together critical infrastructure operators, emergency and essential service providers, and local and regional authorities to move from fragmented, top-down, and asset-centric approaches toward inclusive, integrated, and service-focused resilience management. ECHO promotes a shift from short-term, event-driven crisis response to long-term service life-cycle resilience, emphasising robustness, adaptability, and continuity over time. At the core of ECHO is an EU-sovereign Knowledge Hub and a centralized Collaborative Resilience Management Platform that offers interoperable, modular, and cost-effective services. These include tools for threat modelling and forecasting, multi-hazard risk and resilience assessment, real-time situational awareness, advanced decision support, resilience plan evaluation, and scenario-based simulations that capture cascading and compounding effects across sectors and territories. ECHO’s Information Sharing Protocol enables secure, transparent collaboration and resource pooling, helping especially smaller municipalities and operators overcome budget, capacity, and data barriers. By harnessing cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI, the project supports advanced analytics, forecasting, and decision-making while upholding data protection, explainability, and trustworthiness. The project is deployed and validated through four pilot sites in Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and the cross-border Italy–Slovenia region, covering diverse multi-hazard contexts including floods, landslides, droughts, earthquakes, wildfires, infrastructure failures, and cyber-attacks. Through co-creation with local stakeholders and extensive dissemination of best practices, ECHO aims to scale its solutions across Europe, empowering communities of all sizes to strengthen resilience, protect essential services, and enhance the security and well-being of citizens in an evolving risk landscape. The main objectives of the ECHO project include:

• Ecosystem Collaboration: Foster seamless strategic and operational collaboration among Local and Regional Authorities (AUTs), Essential Service Providers (ESPs), Emergency Service Providers (EMPs), and other stakeholders (e.g., volunteers) across different sectors, communities, and territories, and encourage continuous interaction to (i) improve overall urban resilience, (ii) enable efficient and coordinated emergency response, and (iii) ensure the well-being of communities in different areas across the EU.
• Resource Reuse: Maximise and promote reuse and sharing of existing resources, including data, models, tools, equipment, as well as resilience documents, to (i) optimise resource utilization and reduce redundancy, (ii) enhance collective preparedness and a sense of unity, and (iii) increase operational efficiency.
• Accessible Solutions: Develop new and/or repurpose existing innovative, interoperable, modular, scalable, cost-effective solutions that improve the efficiency of AUTs, ESPs, and EMPs and enhance the capacity of these entities across the EU to increase resilience of their urban infrastructure and effectively manage the life cycle of their essential services, regardless of their type, size, location, budget, or readiness.

MKLab is responsible for developing an AI-powered satellite monitoring service that detects and tracks natural hazards, including wildfires, floods, landslides, droughts, and earthquakes, to support timely risk management and emergency response.