On 15 August 2026, the new Critical Entities Resilience Act (Wet weerbaarheid kritieke entiteiten, Wwke) came into force in the Netherlands. The act stems from the European CER Directive and is about physical resilience: does essential service provision continue when something fails, and how quickly is it restored. For municipalities, the question shifts from their own organisation to their area. Not whether the systems are in order, but what happens in the neighbourhood when a service fails.
What applies now
The VNG member letter of 14 August summarises the current state of affairs. For each essential service, it is assessed whether municipalities play a critical role in it and, if so, which municipalities. This concerns the sectors energy, drinking water, wastewater, transport and telecom. Municipalities for which a designation procedure starts are approached directly by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and then have nine months for a sectoral risk assessment, based on the sectoral risk analysis of the responsible ministry.
More important for the longer term are two sentences that appear rather modestly. Designation happens in phases, per sector with its own planning, and can also start after the act has entered into force. And according to the VNG, municipalities that are not designated would also do well to have insight into their dependencies on critical infrastructure and chain partners.
Critical infrastructure: when a service fails, what happens in the area is what counts
There is no finish line anywhere
Anyone who puts these points side by side sees that this act is hard to tick off a list.
Sectors come into scope in phases, meaning the playing field will keep changing in the coming years. The risk assessment is repeated periodically and revised as soon as there is a new threat. And the dependencies themselves are anything but static: the energy grid is changing in character, care is moving to people’s homes, neighbourhoods are densifying, climate risks are shifting. What seemed like an edge case last year may be next year’s defining scenario.
Resilience thus becomes less of a product that is delivered and more of a picture that is maintained. That is not a criticism of the plans currently in place, which are often excellent in substance. It is a practical observation: an adopted document captures a moment, while the question underneath keeps moving. In the next round, collecting and combining the same data starts all over again, and in practice that is where most of the time goes.
Four questions about your own area
Behind the requirements of the act are four questions a municipality must be able to answer about its own territory. Each of them questions whose answer is scattered across data from different sources.
What is where, and what depends on it? This requires object information at building level from the base registries: usage functions, vulnerability according to national definitions, storage of hazardous substances and risk contours, pipelines, water structures and telecom antennas. One often underestimated piece of information is which grid operator serves a building. It makes the conversation with that grid operator concrete for a specific area instead of in generalities, and with the rise of digital twins of the electricity grid, that link will only become more useful in the coming years.
Who is affected? Population density says little about that. More useful are care functions, senior housing complexes, childcare and education, the locations safety regions designate as having reduced self-reliance, and the figures from environmental services on how many people to expect during the day. Complemented by the accessibility of daily amenities per neighbourhood, this creates the picture that administrative decisions are ultimately about, and that a council will ask for.
Digitwin: impact analysis of critical objects during a power interruption (Utrecht)
What happens in this scenario? Flood depths, effect areas, dispersion based on the current wind direction, and the knock-on effects of outages on accessibility, evacuation options and shelter capacity. It is rarely about the first order, because everyone knows that no power also means no pumps. It is about the timeline behind it. Telecom antennas have limited battery life, making connectivity and alerting an issue of the first evening rather than day three. For pumping stations, the question is not whether they fail, but how many hours of storage remain before the sewer overflows, and where that happens first.
Does that picture stay current? Base registries are updated monthly, grid operators publish live outage information, weather and traffic data are available in real time. An analysis connected to those sources does not age between two assessments. An analysis sitting as a file on a network drive does.
None of these four questions is complicated in itself. The difficulty lies in the coherence, and in the fact that the answer must remain usable at different moments: during planning, during an incident and in the aftermath. That is exactly the problem a digital twin of the physical environment was designed for, and why the step from fragmented safety data to one shared area picture delivers so much in this dossier.
Explainable matters at least as much as complete
The act requires that measures are traceable to the risk picture. That changes how such an analysis is best set up.
As long as the weighting sits in the head of an experienced advisor, the judgement is often excellent but hard to transfer. If the criteria and weights are explicitly recorded in a digital twin, the conversation is about those criteria instead of about the outcome. That is a better conversation with the council and with chain partners, and it turns the periodic repetition the act requires into a recalculation instead of a new project. In risk management, that shift has already been visible in recent years.
The same applies to the places where the data ends. There is, for example, no national registry of residents who depend on electrically powered care at home, and no model solves that. What is possible, is pinpointing exactly where that blind spot is, so the conversation with care providers and the grid operator is held in a targeted way instead of in general terms.
There is already a lot to build on
The good news is that little needs to be invented.
Safety regions have been working with regional risk profiles, scenario thinking and continuity of vital functions for years. Last year, the VNG published its guide on resilience at the local level, built around six pillars and four crisis phases, and what that guide means for municipalities aligns seamlessly with what this act now requires. In addition, the national Emergency Support Points pilot is currently underway, carried out by the NIPV on behalf of the VNG, the safety regions and the Ministry of Justice and Security, in almost seventy municipalities across all 25 safety regions. Its advice will follow in early 2027.
That work gets stronger as municipality and safety region work on the same underlying data. What that looks like in practice is shown by Tilburg in its preparation for emergency support points. There, around a thousand buildings were assessed on some two hundred characteristics, from accessibility and building properties to energy supply, age distribution and flood risk, resulting in nine promising locations. For each location, the first five thousand residents were then analysed. Because the criteria and weights are recorded and adjustable in the digital twin, the analysis can be rerun as soon as something changes.
The question this act asks is not new to anyone working in this field. What changes, is that the answer must remain current and explainable, even when it is asked again in a few years.
Want to know more?
Curious how such an area-based picture is built in practice, or how other municipalities and safety regions approach this? We are happy to discuss the subject in depth. More background is available on our pages about digital twins for municipalities, digital twins for safety regions en resilient cities.
more news
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay up to date with our digital twin innovations!
Together with the City of Helmond and KPN, Argaleo brings sensor data, public sources and municipal data together in the Digitwin. The same road sensor now supports both winter maintenance and heat stress analysis.
City of The Hague: the Crowd Safety Manager (CSM) on the Digitwin platform, developed with TU Delft and Argaleo, has grown into a structural tool within the coastal action plan, moving from measuring to forecasting.
SmartwayZ.NL and Argaleo developed Mobility Matching, an application on the Digitwin platform that shows for 3,712 work locations which sustainable mobility measure delivers the most impact.
The new Critical Entities Resilience Act makes resilience a continuous process. Four questions every municipality must be able to answer about its own area.
Together with the City of Tilburg, Argaleo is building a digital foundation for the full urban resilience challenge on the Digitwin platform. The first application: the emergency support point scan.
Jeroen Steenbakkers was a guest on the podcast Over AI in de Stad, discussing how governments can use AI responsibly in spatial planning.