The European Commission proposed a new policy to help vulnerable communities across the world build resilience to future crises. The measures proposed range from improving access to food through supporting partner countries to ensuring that governments are alerted quickly at the outbreak of crises. With this new policy, the Commission puts resilience at the heart of its work on fighting hunger and poverty.

The European Commission published its new strategy for building resilience in a form of a Communication entitled "The EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security Crises". The Communication draws lessons from the experience of responding to recent food crises and outlines the measures with which the European Union will help vulnerable populations reduce the impact of future crises and disasters. Recently, the European Commission granted €40 million in additional EU assistance to strengthen the resilience of the Sahel to future crises.

This new Communication from the European Commission outlines a wide range of activities for building resilience, from improving access to food through supporting partner countries to ensuring that governments are alerted quickly at the outbreak of crises. Strengthening resilience is at the core of successful humanitarian and development policies, according to the European Commission.

Resilience is the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, to adapt, and to quickly recover from stresses and shocks. Working with vulnerable populations to build their resilience is a fundamental part of poverty reduction, which is the ultimate aim of EU development policy as has been reaffirmed in the recent Agenda for Change. As a result of the SHARE (Horn of Africa) and AGIR (Sahel) programmes the EU has invested €3 million euros in HarvestPlus, which develops more nutritious and resilient seeds for poor farmers in Africa. Work on resilience also enabled the development of early-warning systems in Nepal during the 2010 floods which allowed evacuation of people living in the danger zones.