This past summer was one of the hottest on record in Albania. But what made the heat truly unbearable was not the thermometer — it was the headlines. Fires bursting across the hillsides, orange skies, smoke reaching the coast.

We had grown so accustomed to summer fires and winter floods that it had begun to feel like a grim, unvarying calendar. And I have seen it all: earthquakes when I was six and four decades later, the floods that swallowed lowland villages, the wildfire spreading like wind through bone-dry pine. You stop being surprised. You start being afraid instead.

Fear is only useful when it moves you to act — I tend to believe.

Climate change exacerbates these hazards — this is no longer contested. But they can also be anticipated and prepared for. This summer, amid the smoke, I found myself genuinely grateful to be telling a story that goes in the other direction — toward resilience.

RESEAL — the Resilience Strengthening Project — is funded by a consortium of partners whose collective investment reflects a sustained, multi-year commitment to building systemic resilience in Albania's civil protection architecture. Albania itself sits at the table as a co-funder, alongside Sweden, Portugal, and most recently Switzerland through SECO. UNDP implements the project in partnership with Albania's National Civil Protection Agency. This is not a project that arrived with a single donor's blueprint and a five-year exit plan. It is a coalition — patient, principled, and attentive to what Albania needs as it navigates EU accession.

RESEAL consolidated achievements from Phase I while initiating Phase II — ensuring continuity and scaling of results rather than starting from scratch with each new funding cycle.

During its first phase, RESEAL laid the institutional groundwork that any serious disaster risk management system requires. Multi-institutional coordination platforms were established, bringing central government bodies, local authorities, development partners, and civil society into structured dialogue for the first time. 

This convergence of actors gave rise to Albania's National Disaster Risk Reduction Platform — a permanent national forum through which institutions can jointly shape policy, align priorities, and coordinate action on disaster risk reduction. These are not ceremonial structures. They are the institutional sinew that holds a national preparedness system together.

The second phase, made possible by Switzerland through SECO, did not begin from a blank page. It inherited a foundation of relationships, platforms, and lessons — and built from there. Throughout, the project has maintained its alignment with EU civil protection standards and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, reinforcing Albania's broader commitment to harmonising its disaster risk governance with European and international standards.

The project invested in six priority regions — Korçë, Dibër, Kukës, Gjirokastër, Fier, and Shkodër — each with its own geography of risk and its own memory of disaster. Through training sessions and planning exercises, prefecture and municipal authorities strengthened the capacity to anticipate risks, not just react to them. In Shkodër, detailed local risk assessments were initiated across all municipalities, generating the kind of granular evidence that planning offices rarely have access to. The model is now being considered for national replication.