When small businesses restart, cities recover: How Barcelona built an SME resilience ecosystem, and what other cities can learn from it

The day the lights went out

On 28 April 2025, the Iberian Peninsula went dark. Within seconds, an unprecedented power outage swept across Spain and Portugal, paralysing transport, payments, telecommunications and basic urban services.

In Catalonia alone, 96% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) reported direct disruptions to their activities. Estimated losses reached €878 million for Catalan SMEs, with an average of €1,640 per business, with some firms reporting losses of more than €25,000.

The blackout was a wake-up call, but not an isolated event. Over the past five years, Barcelona’s businesses had experienced a succession of disruptive events: Storm Gloria (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2024 drought, record-breaking heatwaves, the cascading effects of the late-2024 Mediterranean DANA storm in Valencia, and the 2025 wildfires that burned over 410,000 hectares - the most severe wildfire season in Spain in 30 years.

Taken together, these events signaled a clear message: Barcelona’s risk landscape is evolving rapidly, and the city’s businesses are struggling to keep pace.

The businesses that are most exposed are also vital to the city’s daily life, with SMEs accounting for 95% of Barcelona’s business fabric. They run bakeries, restaurants, hotels, professional services, industries, retail shops and neighborhood commerce that keeps the city functioning. When they fail to reopen after a disaster, recovery slows for the entire city. As one widely shared figure puts it: 40% of small businesses never reopen after a major disaster. In areas affected by the DANA in Valencia, the consequences are visible firsthand: commercial streets that were thriving only a few years ago now stand largely empty.

This is the story of how Barcelona, with support of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) through its Strengthening the Disaster Resilience of SMEs initiative, began to close that gap - not through a single intervention, but by building an ecosystem capable of sustaining SME resilience over time.

Barcelona is not new to resilience. The city launched a formal resilience agenda in 2009 with academic partners, pioneering a process to better understand how basic urban services were dealing with risks and interdependencies. It resulted in the creation of Europe’s first Municipal Resilience Department, and led to Barcelona becoming a hub for resilience, as part of the Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030) initiative. Resilience is also firmly embedded into the city’s climate adaptation planning framework (Pla Clima 2018–2030) and across municipal services.

Yet, when UNDRR selected Barcelona - alongside Bridgetown (Barbados) and Sendai (Japan) - as a pilot city for its global SME resilience initiative in 2024, a clear paradox emerged: the city’s ambitious public resilience policies had barely reached the businesses that needed them most.

The landscape assessment carried out between April and July 2025 - combining surveys of SMEs across the metropolitan area, interviews, stakeholder workshops, and policy review - revealed some aspects of the gap:

• Over 80% of SMEs had been directly affected by a hazard in the past five years, yet only 1.5% had a formal Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
• Only 13.4% had received any training on resilience or business continuity
• Only 1.5% knew where to find SME-specific risk information.

The findings showed clear demand: the majority of surveyed SMEs explicitly requested support to strengthen their resilience. What was missing, however, was a coherent support system: accessible tools, tailored training, clear and recognition for their effort.

Barcelona does not lack the expertise, tools, or institutions to support SME resilience. The challenge is fragmentation. Relevant capabilities are spread across chambers of commerce, civil protection authorities, insurers, risk professionals, technology providers, business associations, research centres, and municipal departments, but they are not well connected. As a result, SMEs remain largely outside the system due to institutional, resource, and capacity barriers.

The challenges to be solved

Several key challenges emerged early in the project and shaped the work in Barcelona.

First, risk awareness and exposure did not necessarily translate into preparedness. SMEs increasingly recognised threats, such as heatwaves, blackouts, cyber incidents or supply chain disruptions, yet many still lacked practical tools to operationalise resilience through continuity planning and crisis management.

Second, the support ecosystem for SMEs was fragmented. Initiatives on climate adaptation, cybersecurity, sustainability or emergency planning often evolved separately, with no clear pathways enabling SMEs to move from awareness to implementation.

Third, resilience efforts remained largely invisible from a market perspective. Even when companies invested in preparedness, these efforts rarely generated recognition from customers, insurers, financial institutions or procurement systems.

Fourth, SMEs were underrepresented in many resilience governance and coordination structures, despite representing most of the local economic fabric.

Finally, the project highlighted the need for more sustainable incentive and collaboration models. Long-term resilience cannot rely only on voluntary engagement or individual risk perception. It requires a systemic approach with practical support mechanisms, aligned stakeholders and scalable frameworks capable of making resilience both operational and economically sustainable.

Taken together, these challenges cannot be solved by any organisation alone - instead, they require a joint operating model.

Building multi-stakeholder collaboration around SME resilience

From the outset, the work on SME resilience in Barcelona was designed as multi-stakeholder collaboration rather than a top-down deliverable. UNDRR convened the work, but the local ownership came from a coalition that grew over the year with Barcelona City Council’s Resilience Department and Climate Plan team, the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, the Barcelona Comerç Foundation, AGERS (Spanish Risk Management and Insurance Association), smaller councils in the metropolitan area, other professional and business associations and universities and private sector networks for resilience. The process was developed in phases.

Diagnosis: a shared evidence base

Published jointly by UNDRR and the Barcelona City Council, the Landscape Assessment Study established the city’s first SME-focused resilience baseline. Drawing on surveys, interviews, workshops, and policy analysis, it combined qualitative and quantitative evidence to assess the main gaps and challenges affecting SME resilience in Barcelona, while identifying recommendations across governance, policy, capacity-building, and practical tools for implementation.

Capacity-building tailored to SMEs

Barcelona already had generic resilience and emergency management training available. What was missing was content adapted to the realities of SMEs - a hotel manager, a local retailer, a restaurant owner or a small consultancy with limited time and resources.

The project therefore focused on translating resilience into something practical and accessible. Initial awareness sessions were developed with the support of the IQS School of Management, and later activities expanded into a broader online and in-person programme combining practical Business Continuity Planning support and peer-to-peer crisis exercises, and webinars, in collaboration with local partners, such as the Barcelona Comerç Foundation.

Working together with the City Council, Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, and the Spanish Association of Risk Management and Insurance (AGERS), the programme produced practical BCP templates adapted to SMEs rather than large corporate structures, with sector-specific miniguides on developing BCPs for the tourism and retail sectors, and to guide SMEs on risk transfer and resilience financing instruments.

One of the most important outcomes was that many SMEs engaged for the first time with disaster risk reduction and continuity planning concepts. Several businesses began developing their first operational BCPs directly through the programme.

Crisis simulations: from theory to muscle memory

A BCP that sits in a drawer has limited value. To turn planning into operational capability, partners ran tabletop crisis simulations with SMEs from the commerce and tourism sectors. The exercises used realistic, layered scenarios - including heatwave scenarios with cascading impacts - as well as a Barcelona-specific simulation exercise hosted at the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce featuring simulated media broadcasts, escalating crisis injects, and decision-making scenarios tailored to hotels, restaurants, museums and small tourism operators.

This is where preparedness becomes tangible. In a safe environment, participants discovered practical gaps that are often overlooked until a real crisis occurs: outdated contact lists, unclear decision-making responsibilities, uncertainty around operational shutdown procedures, and confusion over how to protect critical access and maintain essential services during disruptions.

As part of the project, UNDRR, the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and Barcelona City Council, also developed a miniguide to support tourism and retail operators to design crisis simulation exercises at regular intervals, with necessary templates, to continuously test and improve their crisis readiness.

Storytelling: making resilience visible

A key strand of the work focused on making resilience understandable to a wider audience.

Through short videos and written stories featuring local bakers, shopkeepers and hoteliers, the initiative translated resilience from abstract policy language into real life experiences and business realities that other SMEs could easily relate to. The 2025 Iberian blackout, in particular, became a particularly powerful reference point: a real-world test of whether businesses were prepared to continue operating under disruption.

These stories travelled. They were shared at the Smart City Expo World Congress, at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, and across the ARISE Private Sector Network for Disaster Resilient Societies.

Building institutional trust

Behind the project activities, integration of SMEs into the city’s resilience governance began to take shape.

Discussions emerged on integrating SME representation into the Municipal Resilience Committee; connecting business associations better with early warning systems; and embedding SME resilience into local climate plans and sustainability networks.

A new local ecosystem around resilience emerged

By late 2025, the project had achieved something none of its individual partners could have achieved alone: a functioning resilience ecosystem in which a SME could move from risk awareness to developing and testing a BCP, supported by business chambers, city authorities, technical experts and the insurance community.

However, the project also recognised a critical limitation: ecosystems built through projects are not yet systems that persist. People move. Funding cycles end. Priorities shift.

In the case of Barcelona, two complementary initiatives emerged to help sustain momentum beyond the project’s lifecycle.

First, the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce committed to continuing the work. Building on the project’s outcomes, the organisation is now exploring the creation of a more structured SME resilience programme within its broader portfolio of business support services. The proposed programme would provide practical training, business continuity guidance, crisis simulation exercises, and access to resilience tools through the Chamber’s local delegations across the province.

Second, stakeholders proposed establishing a non-profit SME Resilience Alliance that would bring together public- and private-sector actors from across the insurance, risk management, technology, finance, and business support sectors. While the details are still being developed, these initiatives reflect a broader strategic shift enabled by the Barcelona project: moving from fragmented activities toward a credible, transferable, and market-based resilience standard.

Key learnings for other cities and sectors

Five lessons stand out from the Barcelona experience, each one transferable across geographies and sectors.

1. Start with evidence that everyone owns. The Landscape Assessment Study was not just a report; it was the document that gave every partner a shared diagnosis and recommendations they could act on. Without a common evidence base, multi-stakeholder coalitions revert to fragmented agendas. Investing early in a jointly-owned and shared baseline is essential.
2. Ecosystems do not emerge spontaneously, they need to be facilitated. One of the most undervalued roles in SME resilience is that of the convener: the actor responsible for mapping capabilities, connecting unlikely partners, aligning incentives and building a shared framework that partners can operate within. In Barcelona, that role was distributed across UNDRR, the Chamber of Commerce and the City Council. Other cities should explicitly design and resource this function.
3. Meet SMEs where they are. A bakery owner does not have time to develop a 40-page BCP or attend a three-day ISO 22301 course. The approaches that worked in Barcelona were short, modular, sector-specific, and delivered through trusted intermediaries, such as chambers of commerce, business associations, and neighbourhood commerce networks. Translation into local languages - Catalan and Spanish in Barcelona’s case - and plain-language communication mattered as much as technical content.
4. Make resilience visible and recognisable. Resilience is rarely rewarded by the market. SMEs may invest in preparedness, yet customers, insurers, lenders and public procurers often fail to recognise or value these efforts. For businesses with limited resources, preparing for uncertain risks can be difficult to justify — even though a single disruption can shut a company down. Across SMEs, underinvestment in resilience becomes a societal cost borne by supply chains, communities and governments.
5. Build for permanence, not for the project cycle. Projects end, but institutions endure. The commitment of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and the proposed SME Resilience Alliance are a deliberate attempt to outlast individual funding cycles, providing the ecosystem with a permanent home, an evolving methodology, and a verification mechanism that can maintain credibility over time.

A closing thought

When the next disaster strikes Barcelona — and it will — the real test of resilience will not be how the city responds at the strategic level, but how quickly everyday economic life can recover. It will be whether the bakery on the corner reopens the next morning, whether the family-run hotel keeps its staff employed, whether the local consultancy can continue serving its clients, and whether the neighbourhood pharmacy remains open to support its community.

That is the resilience that matters most to people in their daily lives. It is also the hardest to build, because it depends on thousands of decisions made across thousands of small businesses that no single institution can direct or control.

Barcelona’s experience shows that this kind of resilience cannot be built by a single programme, a single regulation or technology alone. It is built by an ecosystem that aligns public and private actors, by a standard that makes effort visible, and by a label that turns preparedness into market value.

When small businesses restart, cities recover. The work in Barcelona is to make sure they can.