On Thursday 11 September, the European Commission presented new guidelines to help Member States strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructures in the EU, at a time when most governments have yet to implement the Critical Entities Resilience Directive adopted in 2022 (see EUROPE 13534/25, 13229/10).
These guidelines provide recommendations and practical instructions to help Member States identify critical entities in eleven key sectors - including energy, transport, drinking water and wastewater, food, banking and digital infrastructure - it explains in a press release.
In particular, they will help Member States to implement the Directive on the resilience of critical entities, which aims to develop national strategies, carry out regular risk assessments and identify critical entities, at a time when a number of incidents in recent months, such as ruptures in undersea cables or cyber attacks on healthcare establishments, have revealed vulnerabilities.
The guidelines thus clarify the technical interpretation of the ‘Resilience’ directive and should help governments to identify the specific features of certain sectors. “As regards the energy sector, recital 5 of the Directive clarifies that in terms of, in particular, the methods of electricity generation and transmission, (...) electricity generation can include electricity transmission parts of nuclear power plants but excludes the specifically nuclear elements covered by treaties and Union law”.
With regard to the food sector, the same recital 5 of the Directive states that “critical entities should only be identified among food businesses, whether for profit or not and whether public or private, that are engaged exclusively in logistics and wholesale distribution and large-scale industrial production and processing with a significant market share”.
When identifying critical entities, Member States “should consider the particular importance of certain sectors such as transport, as regards the key role of sea or inland waterway ports, roads, airports and railways, in particular when they serve a dual use for military mobility and civilian purposes, water, energy and digital infrastructure for the provision of essential services in other sectors”.
The document also looks at resilience in banking networks and digital infrastructures.
Link to the guidelines: https://aeur.eu/f/idn (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)