Directive 2022/2557 - Resilience of critical entities - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 333/164

Critical entities, as providers of essential services, play an indispensable role in the maintenance of vital societal functions or economic activities in the internal market in an increasingly interdependent Union economy. It is therefore essential to set out a Union framework with the aim of both enhancing the resilience of critical entities in the internal market by laying down harmonised minimum rules and assisting them by means of coherent and dedicated support and supervision measures.

Council Directive 2008/114/EC (4) provides for a procedure for designating European critical infrastructure in the energy and transport sectors the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant cross-border impact on at least two Member States. That Directive focuses exclusively on the protection of such infrastructure. However, the evaluation of Directive 2008/114/EC conducted in 2019 found that, due to the increasingly interconnected and cross-border nature of operations using critical infrastructure, protective measures relating to individual assets alone are insufficient to prevent all disruptions from taking place. Therefore, it is necessary to shift the approach towards ensuring that risks are better accounted for, that the role and duties of critical entities as providers of services essential to the functioning of the internal market are better defined and coherent, and that Union rules are adopted to enhance the resilience of critical entities. Critical entities should be in a position to reinforce their ability to prevent, protect against, respond to, resist, mitigate, absorb, accommodate and recover from incidents that have the potential to disrupt the provision of essential services.

While a number of measures at Union level, such as the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection, and at national level aim to support the protection of critical infrastructure in the Union, more should be done to better equip the entities operating such infrastructure to address the risks to their operations that could result in the disruption of the provision of essential services. More should also be done to better equip such entities because there is a dynamic threat landscape, which includes evolving hybrid and terrorist threats, and growing interdependencies between infrastructure and sectors. Moreover, there is an increased physical risk due to natural disasters and climate change, which intensifies the frequency and scale of extreme weather events and brings long-term changes in average climate conditions that can reduce the capacity, efficiency and lifespan of certain infrastructure types if climate adaptation measures are not in place. In addition, the internal market is characterised by fragmentation in respect of the identification of critical entities because relevant sectors and categories of entities are not recognised consistently as critical in all Member States. This Directive should therefore achieve a solid level of harmonisation in terms of the sectors and categories of entities falling within...