Observatory FAQ: Belgian municipal preparedness
What the observatory of Belgian municipalities measures: three statuses, how data is collected, the 0 to 100 score, right of reply, independence and open data.
What does the observatory measure?
The observatory measures the public visibility of preparedness measures taken by Belgian municipalities and provinces: emergency planning, alerting and informing the public, continuity of services and cybersecurity. It records what a resident can find on official websites.
It does not say whether a plan exists, or whether it is any good. A municipality can be well prepared without showing it online.
What do the three statuses mean?
Each criterion receives one of these statuses:
- Public evidence found: an official page or document shows the measure in a way that can be checked.
- Mentioned without evidence: the measure is referred to, but nothing allows it to be checked.
- No public information found: we found nothing in the sources we consulted.
Does "no public information found" mean "no plan"?
No. Many planning documents are not published, often for good reason: a general emergency and intervention plan, for instance, contains names and phone numbers. This status describes what is visible, not what exists. The observatory never says that a municipality "has no plan".
How is the data collected?
In three steps:
- Collection. A crawler reads the official websites of municipalities and provinces, including public pages and PDFs. It identifies itself, follows each site's robots.txt file and requested crawl delay, spaces out its requests and stays on the official site.
- Pre-classification. An AI model suggests a status for each criterion based on the excerpts found. Email addresses and phone numbers are removed from those excerpts first.
- Human validation. A person checks every criterion before publication. Nothing is published without this validation.
How is the 0 to 100 score calculated?
The score summarises the visibility of eleven criteria in two blocks. The first covers emergency planning under the royal decree of 22 May 2019: general and special emergency plans, exercises, alerting, public information, the safety cell and the emergency planning coordinator. It accounts for three quarters of the points. The second covers continuity of services and cybersecurity.
Public evidence earns all the points of a criterion, a mention without evidence earns part of them, and no information earns none. A dated document, such as an emergency plan, counts slightly less as it gets older. Criteria that do not apply are left out of the calculation. The exact weights and rules are set out in the methodology.
Does the score rank municipalities by how safe they are?
No. A high score means a municipality makes many of its measures visible. It does not measure the quality of the plans or a municipality's real ability to handle a crisis. To learn what lies behind these measures, read our guides on the PGUI emergency plan, municipal business continuity and NIS2 for local authorities.
How can a municipality correct its page?
Through the right of reply page. A municipality can report an error, point to a public document we did not find, or set out its point of view. A person reviews every request, and the page is updated when the information can be checked.
Is the observatory independent from ResiPlan's commercial offer?
Yes. ResiPlan publishes the observatory, but being a ResiPlan customer never changes a score: the same method applies to every municipality. The page is free for municipalities, both to view and to have corrected. The offer for local authorities is separate from the observatory.
Can I reuse the data?
Yes. The observatory's published data can be downloaded as CSV and JSON under the CC BY 4.0 licence: you may reuse it as long as you credit the source. Reference data comes from Statbel (NIS codes and population, CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata (official websites, CC0).
Why 565 municipalities?
Since 1 January 2025 Belgium has had 565 municipalities, down from 581. In Flanders, 28 municipalities merged into 13 new ones; in Wallonia, Bastogne and Bertogne merged in December 2024. The observatory follows the map that resulted from these mergers. The provinces and the Brussels-Capital Region also have their own page.
Do you publish personal data?
No. The observatory records whether a role exists, such as an emergency planning coordinator, never who holds it. No names of elected officials or staff are published, and contact details are removed from excerpts as soon as they are collected.
Does every municipality already have a page?
Pages are published gradually, at the pace of human validation. A page is only published once all its criteria have been checked. The methodology is versioned: if a criterion or a weight changes, a new version is created so that scores remain comparable.