Resilient Borders - Pilot actions for cross-border spatial planning and crisis management [2024-2025]

Duration of the project: From 01/01/2024 to 31/12/2025
Total project budget: €1,052,631.58  (Co-financing Action Grant DG REGIO: €1,000,000)
MOT budget: €526,315.79 (Co-financing: €500,000)
Partners: Association of European Border Regions (AEBR), Transfrontier Operational Mission (MOT)
Funding : DG REGIO, European Commission

Over a two-year period, the Resilient Borders project, coordinated by the MOT and the AEBR, supported the implementation of spatial planning and crisis management plans in European cross-border territories through nineteen pilot actions on the following two themes:

• Cross-border spatial planning (SP) monitored and managed by the MOT – Implementation of ten pilot projects based on the tool developed by the OECD (more info). 
• Cross-border crisis management (CM) monitored and managed by the AEBR – Implementation of nine pilot projects based on the study ‘Strengthening the Resilience of EU Border Regions’.

A call for projects/proposals (funding call?) with two lots enabled ten pilot sites to be selected for each theme. The aim was to implement a coordinated crisis management or action plan at each pilot site over a period of eight months to promote concerted cross-border spatial planning. These plans were intended to be implemented by local political actors in order to strengthen the long-term resilience of cross-border territories in the face of crises. The aim was to achieve results that can be transferred to other sites. Each pilot site received a grant of €40,000.

The pilot sites covered 19 countries and 13 European borders (see map). They covered a wide range of topics: environmental risk management (floods, droughts, fires), health crisis management (epizootics), cooperation on transport and cross-border housing availability, and the establishment of cross-border urban or regional development plans.

Once the pilot actions were implemented, the MOT and the AEBR produced a final compendium of the 19 action plans and a publication listing the lessons learned, methods and good practices for each theme. The aim of the publication was to propose a methodology for transposing the results of the pilot projects to other cross-border sites in order to promote the emergence of cross-border adaptation plans for territories, with the aim of strengthening their resilience to crises.