The handbook brings together academic research, experience from Tallinn and discussions from the EDENTallinn expert seminar held on 19 September 2026. In addition to the main text, the publication includes an extensive glossary that helps clarify concepts related to urban gardening, food security and crisis preparedness, and avoids the confusion that can arise when terms with different meanings are used interchangeably.

“We wanted to produce a handbook that is as practical as possible – one that does not promise more from community gardens than they can realistically deliver, while at the same time recognising their considerable potential. A garden is not simply a place where food grows. It can also be a place where skills, relationships, knowledge and people’s willingness to take action can grow,” said Anne-May Nagel, co-founder of the Crisis Research Centre and project manager of EDENTallinn.

Why discuss urban gardening in the context of crisis preparedness?

The day-to-day functioning of cities depends on many systems and supply chains that often go largely unnoticed under normal circumstances. Food reaches shops, water comes from the tap, and most essential goods and services remain continuously available. During a disruption, however, these dependencies quickly become visible. The starting point of the EDENTallinn project was not the idea that a city should begin feeding itself through community gardens. Quite the opposite: one of the central questions was what community and educational gardens can realistically contribute, and where the limits of their potential lie.

“We are not suggesting that community gardens could replace Tallinn’s food supply in a crisis. The more interesting question is what capacity already exists in these places before a crisis occurs – who knows how to grow food, who knows the local area, who can bring people together, and how this knowledge can be retained and passed on,” Nagel explained.

Among other topics, the handbook examines why a community garden, an educational garden and an urban farm are not the same thing; how food availability, food access and food security differ; how seasonality affects what gardens can do; and why the mere existence of a garden does not automatically amount to crisis preparedness. At the same time, this is neither a gardening manual nor a crisis-response guide. The handbook is intended above all to help communities, gardening organisers, educational institutions and local decision-makers ask more precise questions and take a more systematic view of the resources already available.

Participants have been selected over several months based on their motivation and willingness to serve as community contacts within the crisis network and assist the city when needed. The programme is open exclusively to adult Tallinn residents who want to put their knowledge into practice by volunteering to support their communities and districts.

Participants’ skills and preferred areas of involvement have been mapped across Nõmme’s two groups, and members have begun communicating with one another. This provides a basis for planning cooperation around individual strengths and availability. “The value of building a network becomes clear when people begin to see how their skills complement one another. Nobody needs to know everything or take on every task. In Nõmme, people have already made connections that allow them to seek advice, share responsibilities and prepare to work together,” said Hannes Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre and KRAKO Project Lead.

The city and district administrations have a role in helping this cooperation continue beyond the training programme. Regular contact and joint exercises provide opportunities to clarify volunteers’ roles and give them feedback on their contributions. Tallinn Deputy Mayor Tiit Terik and Gerry Konnov, Head of Nõmme District, also visited the second group’s first training session.

Tallinn presented its Entrepreneurship Awards for the 23rd time this year, recognising companies, organisations and projects whose work has a wider impact on the city. In 2026, civil protection was introduced for the first time as one of the seven award categories. The Crisis Research Centre’s KRAKO crisis network was selected by the evaluation committee as one of the nominees in the category. The nominees were recognised at a formal reception held at Tallinn Town Hall on 13 October. When presenting this year’s nominees, Tallinn Mayor Peeter Raudsepp highlighted the diversity and ambition of their work.

“This is recognition of an approach which sees crisis preparedness as something that cannot be built solely from the top down. At local level, there needs to be a capacity to bring together people, their knowledge and their willingness to act. The fact that KRAKO was nominated for the Tallinn Civil Protection Promoter award confirms to us that developing community crisis networks is an important part of strengthening civil protection in Tallinn,” said Hannes Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre and KRAKO Project Lead.

Crisis preparedness does not mean coping alone

The Crisis Research Centre works from the principle that crisis preparedness goes beyond individual preparedness. Alongside household emergency supplies, knowledge and practical skills, people’s ability to cope during a prolonged or large-scale crisis also depends on cooperation between residents, communities, city districts and the authorities responsible for crisis management.

“Crisis preparedness does not mean that people are expected to cope with everything on their own. It is an ongoing process of building the capacity to prepare for and manage crises in a way that allows people’s daily lives, essential services and society as a whole to continue functioning to the greatest extent possible. This requires not only individual preparedness, but also effective relationships and the capacity to cooperate with those around us,” Nagel explained.

Through the KRAKO crisis network project, a foundation is being established in western Tallinn for the more systematic development of local crisis networks. The project brings together people who want to contribute to crisis preparedness in their local area, provides them with a shared foundation of knowledge about civil protection and action during crises, and creates contacts that city districts and the Tallinn Municipal Police Department can build on in developing further cooperation. The aim of local networks is to establish these contacts and the basis for cooperation before a crisis occurs. People who know their local area can help identify local needs, share information and support existing crisis management arrangements.

Bringing together architects, developers, construction professionals and public sector representatives, the conference explored a central question: what needs to change in construction to ensure that buildings provide effective protection during a crisis? In the Crisis Research Centre’s view, shelter provision must be integrated into building design, but a space that meets the requirements does not automatically provide a workable shelter.

“A shelter is infrastructure, but it can only provide effective protection when the space, access arrangements, technical systems and people’s actions all work together. At the design stage, we need to ask detailed questions about who will open it, how people will reach it and who will actually prepare it for use. These arrangements need to be worked through and practised repeatedly, as they are among the key issues facing local authorities today,” said Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre.

For developers and designers in Estonia, this means incorporating the building’s emergency functions into the design brief before its main spatial arrangements are finalised. Users’ needs, accessibility, maintenance and the effects of power and water outages must all be considered early on. A multipurpose space can serve everyday needs and provide protection during a crisis, provided there is a realistic plan for making it ready for shelter use. This can also reduce the need for costly alterations later. For existing buildings, the question of how costs are shared is particularly pressing: are the expectations placed on owners matched by the knowledge, technical support and funding they need to meet them?

The first earthquake was recorded at 08:35 and the second at 12:03 Lithuanian local time. Their magnitudes were 2.7 and 2.4, respectively. The Lithuanian Geological Survey (Lietuvos geologijos tarnyba, hereafter LGT) described them as the first earthquakes to have been reliably recorded and located within the territory of the country.¹ The word “reliably” is important here. Earthquakes have been associated with Lithuania before, but there has not always been sufficient information to determine the origin or precise location of historical accounts. The two earthquakes in 2025 therefore mark a new stage in the history of seismological observations in Lithuania.

Lithuania is located in the western part of the East European Craton. A craton is an old and relatively stable part of the continental crust, and Lithuania lies far from active plate boundaries, where many of the world’s strongest earthquakes occur. The country’s seismicity is therefore low, but even within a tectonic plate, stresses can cause rock blocks to move suddenly along faults. Such earthquakes are known as intraplate earthquakes. In Lithuania’s case, studying them is made more difficult by the small number of events: on the basis of individual earthquakes, it is difficult to determine which old faults may be capable of moving in the present-day stress field. Interpretations of the location and extent of faults are also not always the same across different studies.²

To understand the 2025 earthquakes, it is first necessary to look beneath Lithuania’s surface. The country’s crystalline basement is not uniform: western and eastern Lithuania belong to crustal domains with different structures, separated in broad terms by the north–south-trending Central Lithuanian Suture Zone.^A Crustal thickness also varies by region: in the West Lithuanian Domain it is approximately 40–45 kilometres, while farther east it may reach about 50–55 kilometres.² Lithuania’s crystalline basement is covered by younger sedimentary rocks, which means that its composition and structure are studied mainly through drill cores and geophysical measurements.³ This is precisely why the calm relief visible at the surface does not describe the full geological structure beneath the ground.

The KRAKO training programme is not focused solely on individual preparedness. Its aim is to bring together people who live and work in the area and who are both interested in and willing to support their community during a crisis, while helping to develop a functioning local network of contacts and cooperation.

“Crisis preparedness is not simply about having the necessary supplies at home and knowing what to do yourself. It is just as important to know who is around you, what knowledge and skills they have, and who you can work with when needed. Once a crisis has begun, it is too late to start exchanging phone numbers and looking for people who might be willing to help,” said KRAKO Project Lead Hannes Nagel.

During the training day, participants explored the principles of crisis preparedness and civil protection, the role of communities during emergencies, and the ways in which local residents can help identify people who may need assistance, share information and support their neighbourhoods. The practical first aid component was delivered by paramedic Andrus Lehtmets. The KRAKO programme combines local-level crisis preparedness, community cooperation and practical skills.

Training is also creating new connections for future cooperation

Feedback from the first Mustamäe training session clearly demonstrated why bringing people together is such an important part of the KRAKO project. When participants were asked, “How many new people did you meet during the training whom you could contact or work with in the future on crisis preparedness and community safety?”, nearly 92% said they had made at least one new contact. Around one third of participants identified two or three people with whom they could potentially cooperate in the future.

“For us, this is a very important outcome. A crisis network cannot simply be created as a list of names or a diagram. It has to be built around people who have actually met, spoken to one another and know whom they can turn to when needed. In that sense, the training is only the starting point. Our aim is for these new connections to gradually develop into a functioning local crisis network in Mustamäe,” said Nagel.

The strength of local residents lies precisely in their local knowledge. They know their own building, street and neighbourhood, are able to identify people and situations that cannot be understood in the same level of detail centrally, and can help share information, connect people and identify residents who may need additional support during a crisis. The KRAKO crisis network aims to strengthen local-level crisis management capacity across Tallinn’s city districts.

In the early stages of a crisis, the problem may not be that decision-makers lack information. The issue may also lie in how the available information is interpreted collectively and which possible explanations are regarded as relevant in the course of discussion. The article examines the decision to allow a mass event to take place in Saaremaa in March 2020, which was later associated with the emergence of one of Estonia’s first major COVID-19 outbreaks.

The study focuses on the so-called crisis incubation period – the phase in which a crisis is already developing, but its potential consequences are not yet fully visible. Using the Saaremaa case, the researchers analysed 17 media articles and five stakeholder interviews and mapped the network of team sensemaking involved in the decision-making process.

The study shows that team sensemaking focused largely on gathering available information and refining existing interpretations. At the same time, individuals may have noticed warning signs, questioned prevailing assumptions or proposed alternative interpretations, but these perspectives did not always reach the centre of collective decision-making. This helps explain why, in the early stages of a crisis, warning signs already present in the available information may still go unnoticed.

The panel discussion brought together Hannes Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre; Orvika Reilend, Head of Tourism at the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency; crisis preparedness expert Raivo Lumiste; Heiki Soodla, Head of the Western Rescue Centre; and Jaan Ratnik, representing Tervis Spa Group. The discussion was moderated by Mirko Ojakivi.

At the beginning of the panel, participants were asked to rate Estonia’s current level of crisis preparedness on a ten-point scale. Nagel rated it at roughly one out of ten, pointing primarily to serious shortcomings in practical capabilities and the resources available to the internal security sector. According to him, both the Crisis Research Centre and the Estonian Rescue Workers’ Trade Union have been drawing attention to these weaknesses for years. “Civil protection must move from plans to actual capability, which is simply not possible under the chronic underfunding that has long characterised Estonia’s internal security sector,” said Hannes Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre.

“Public authorities have all kinds of plans and concepts in place, but in a polycrisis the outcome is determined by the capabilities that actually exist. A plan is not a capability. Having a generator, for example, does not solve the problem if we have not considered where the fuel will come from during a prolonged disruption, who will maintain it, who can repair it, and how the entire system will function when one dependency after another is disrupted,” Nagel noted.

According to Nagel, crisis preparedness discussions often overlook precisely those practical and seemingly mundane details on which real continuity depends. The same applies to large-scale evacuation. Moving, receiving and temporarily accommodating hundreds of thousands of people is not merely a logistical issue, but requires transport, accommodation, catering, medical assistance, security, information, personnel, coordination and functioning local networks to operate simultaneously. In Nagel’s assessment, many of these capabilities in Estonia currently remain closer to the level of planning than to sufficiently tested and practised operational capacity.

Polycrisis does not simply refer to several crises occurring at the same time. At its core is the interconnectedness of crises and systems: disruption in one area affects others, these effects can spread across sectors, and may in turn amplify the original problem. “In a polycrisis, the greatest challenge is not simply that we are facing multiple problems at once. The real difficulty lies in the way these problems interact, reshape one another, and transform the system in which we operate,” said Hannes Nagel, Head of the Crisis Research Centre.

This perspective is particularly relevant to the tourism sector, which depends simultaneously on transport, energy, infrastructure, labour, digital systems, public-sector capacity, and people’s sense of security. Crisis preparedness therefore cannot focus solely on what may happen within the tourism sector itself. It must also take into account the systems on which tourism depends and the relationships between them. “Risk analysis in tourism can no longer be limited to asking what might happen to the sector itself. We also need to consider what may happen to the systems on which tourism depends, and how disruptions in those systems may interact and reinforce one another,” Nagel noted.

In his presentation, Nagel also addressed how major crises can alter the normal operating logic of entire sectors and require organisations to use existing resources, networks, and relationships in new ways. He highlighted Ukraine as an example, where the tourism sector has taken on additional societal functions alongside its traditional role. “In a crisis, there is not always time to build entirely new systems. Adaptation often depends on how effectively we are able to reorganise and repurpose the systems and capacities that are already in place,” Nagel said.

Nõmme starts from a different position when preparing for crises than, for example, Haabersti or Mustamäe. Although the district also has apartment buildings, it is characterised by extensive areas of detached and private houses and a garden-city-style spatial structure. According to Tallinn’s data, Nõmme has considerably more single-family homes than apartment buildings. This means that crisis preparedness must also take into account people who are more dispersed across the area, different types of buildings, local roads and the needs of a wide variety of households.

“While Nõmme does have larger apartment buildings, it is predominantly an area of detached houses, which creates its own challenges for crisis preparedness. In a large apartment building, it may be possible to reach dozens of people through a single stairwell, whereas in areas of detached houses, people and resources are more dispersed. It is precisely in such situations that local people who know their street and neighbourhood become valuable: they can help identify needs, relay information and support the municipality’s activities,” said Anne-May Nagel, co-founder and researcher at the Crisis Research Centre.

During the training day, the Nõmme District Government introduced the principles of crisis preparedness at city and district level, as well as its expectations for the development of the local crisis network. The Crisis Research Centre addressed the role of communities in civil protection and covered the basic knowledge required in this area, while paramedic Andrus Lehtmets focused on practical first aid. These three perspectives – local government arrangements, the capacity of communities to act, and practical skills at individual level – also form a key part of the KRAKO training programme.