Critical infrastructure, production and services are to great extent owned and operated by the private sector on commercial basis. They are also growingly more international and therefore tie countries together co-enhance their robustness and continuity.

Value and supply chains are both long and complex as well as they go beyond the European internal market all the way to global scale. Covid-19 along with its cascading impacts highlighted the importance of value chain under-standing for the continuity of societal processes. Hence, understanding dependencies and interdependencies is a building block of resilience.

Finland is no strangers to dependencies, as it is on the northern edge of the EU and dependent, for example, on the cargo flows through the Baltic Sea as well as the digital infrastructures that connect us to Europe. Finland shares the circumstances with Sweden and Norway which have therefore long-standing relations when it comes to security of supply and preparedness more broadly.

In 2017 they identified cross-border flows of goods as a mutually beneficial theme to focus on and deepen their joint understanding. Less than two years later they began a trilateral project exploring the mutual dependencies and interdependencies on six different sectors relevant for security of supply and preparedness (Critial Nordic Flows).

The project concluded in a number of discoveries on communications and digital networks, energy, food, financial infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, and transport sectors as well as a bird’s eye view of the key cooperation arrangements in which the three countries are currently involved. From the start of the project, it was also deemed important to find areas in which the countries could benefit from pursuing cross-sectoral combinations of measures and use the mutually collected insights for advancing cooperation on practical level as well.