What is a 72-hour survival kit?

In March 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Preparedness Union Strategy – a set of thirty actions designed to help Europe cope with an era of overlapping crises, from floods and wildfires to pandemics, cyberattacks, and armed conflict. One recommendation quickly caught the public's attention: every household should be able to look after itself for at least the first 72 hours of an emergency.

The logic is simple. After a major incident, it can take emergency services up to three days to reach everyone, restore power, or clear roads. A basic kit – water, food, medicines, a torch, a radio, chargers, cash, copies of key documents, and warm clothing – buys a household time while responders mobilise. The idea isn't new: Nordic countries such as Finland and Sweden have long urged citizens to prepare for a week or more, and the EU's 72 hours is meant as a shared European minimum.

So far, so sensible. But the problem OPEN RELIEF is interested in isn't the advice – it's the kits themselves. Much of what fills emergency kits today, and much of the humanitarian aid distributed after disasters, is single-use, hard to repair, and quickly discarded. When a water filter clogs or a shelter tears, there is often no way to fix it locally. Items are designed far from the people who use them, and rarely adapted to different climates, cultures, or needs.

That creates three linked problems. There is waste, as mountains of unrepairable equipment pile up. There is dependency, as communities wait for the next delivery instead of mending what they already have. And there is a poor fit, as a kit designed for one context fails in another. Preparedness that ends the moment something breaks isn't really preparedness at all.

OPEN RELIEF asks a different question: what if preparedness tools were designed to be repaired, remade, and adapted by the people who rely on them? Working across Croatia, Ukraine, and Greece, the project brings designers, humanitarian workers, and communities together to co-create eleven open-source preparedness solutions – things like water filters, modular shelters, and repairable tools – that people can build, fix, and improve using freely shared designs.

The 72-hour message is a good starting point. OPEN RELIEF is about what comes next: making sure that when the first three days are over, communities aren't left holding equipment they can't mend. Preparedness, in other words, that lasts.