In recent years, the concept of resilience started to dominate strategic, operational as well as political domains of modern societies. Living in highly interconnected environment, where layers of infrastructures, people and economic interests interact creating both opportunities and vulnerabilities, different countries around the world turned towards resilience practices to reduce vulnerability of their critical infrastructures and societies. However, how can one implement resilience concepts without a comprehensive understanding of the concept itself? Focusing on the concept and practice of critical infrastructure resilience, this report provides a comprehensive overview of the existing scientific literature regarding the concept of resilience in general. It discusses the development of the concept of resilience and its application in societal, economic, ecological, organisational and critical infrastructure domains. The report provides an extensive discussion on the definition of resilience concepts, as well as information on scientific endeavours to implement and measure concepts of resilience.

The report also contains detailed information on the definitions and implementation of the concepts of resilience in different continents, namely Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America and South America. Focusing on the concept of critical infrastructure resilience, it provides an overview of the existing official concepts of resilience, implementation tools, and general practices aimed at increasing organisational, societal, economic and technical resilience in different countries.

To collect all the information, the IMPROVER consortium performed an extensive literature review on the use of resilience concepts. We also held a workshop with the associate partners, and conducted a set of personal interviews with critical infrastructure operators and resilience experts around the Europe. While conducting a number of case studies in different continents, we analysed existing region and state-level documents, and reports.