Mapping territorial resilience across Europe: a digital dashboard helps strengthen crisis response and policy development

Arup’s digital team developed the Territorial Resilience Dashboard – a Europe-wide platform that turns complex data into clear, actionable insights. Arup’s team defined a comprehensive framework for assessing resilience and carried out cross-regional analyses and case studies to examine how governance structures, social cohesion, and environmental conditions drive territorial adaptation and transformation. 

The dashboard enables policymakers to integrate resilience into planning and governance, informing the future of EU cohesion and territorial policy.

Designing a policy-support platform for territorial resilience

Arup’s specialists combined their expertise in digital services, spatial analytics, and resilience planning to design the Territorial Resilience Dashboard, an interactive tool that visualises how regions in Europe absorb, adapt, and transform in the face of crisis. The platform is one of the key deliverables from the ESPON TERRES project, which developed a robust understanding of territorial resilience. 

Built on a set of 72 indicators, the dashboard translates complex data into accessible visualisations that allow users to explore resilience patterns, compare regions, and identify long-term vulnerabilities and strengths. These indicators assess how well regions can absorb shocks, adapt to change, and transform over time.  

To complement the analytical insights, policy recommendations were developed to embed resilience thinking into territorial policymaking across EU, national, regional, and local levels. This included a strategic framework, targeted measures tailored to different governance scales, and proposals for further research. 

In this way, the dashboard offers policymakers a multidimensional understanding of resilience that bridges evidence, experience, and foresight. 

Turning insight into impact

Arup’s digital and resilience team contributed to developing the conceptual, methodological and analytical framework for territorial resilience, drawing on scientific literature, analysing European policy, and engaging directly with stakeholders, including researchers and policymakers. Resilience is understood as the ability to recover from crisis but also the capacity to evolve and improve in response to change. This framework is underpinned by a dynamic, place-based approach to governance and investment. 

The dashboard is now helping policymakers actively inform the evolution of EU cohesion and sectoral policies with a robust indicator framework and targeted policy recommendations, to strengthen the capacity of regions to anticipate risk, adapt to change and pursue sustainable transformation in an era of multiple crises.