The Swedish Coast Guard is one of many authorities that form part of society's crisis preparedness. Our focus is the maritime environment. We are the civilian actor with the greatest combined capability above, on and under the water surface. As an authority, we must be able to support society not only in everyday incidents and accidents, but also in crises that affect large parts of society and possibly the whole country.

We have the capability and preparedness to handle severe crises in peacetime, and the capability to handle a crisis when it occurs. Within total defence, we mainly carry out rescue service tasks and maintain public order at sea in every situation on the threat scale: in everyday life, in a crisis, in times of heightened alert and in war. This means that we must plan for and build a good capability to carry out our mission, prevent vulnerabilities and withstand identified threats and risks. If Sweden suffers an armed attack, we must first of all focus on tasks that are important for total defence. We have the same responsibility during a crisis or war for the activities we are responsible for in normal peacetime conditions. The Coast Guard is building up its capability to carry out its critical societal activities in times of heightened alert and war.

Resilience

Resilience, robustness and redundancy are concepts linked to crisis preparedness. Resilience is the ability to function, adapt and withstand threats or crises. Robustness is the ability to withstand disruptions, strain and unexpected events without ceasing to function. Redundancy means having access to extra reserves that can take over if something breaks down. We build resilience through robustness and redundancy.

The Coast Guard has stepped up its work to withstand threats and risks through expanded continuity work. We work actively on overall issues of operational protection in several areas, including statutory protective security, information security and IT security.

Within the Coast Guard, work is under way to improve our ability to have secure and robust command and communication capabilities, in terms of organisation, infrastructure and systems. This includes improving the technology in important parts of our operations. In this way, we can become better at handling different types of threats and have backup solutions if something stops working. It is also important to work continuously to improve security and protection in our operations.

Exercises are another essential part of being prepared. The Coast Guard holds exercises in civil defence, military defence and also in cooperation within NATO.

We exercise regularly with the Swedish Armed Forces and several other actors, at different operational levels, in different geographical areas and with different scenarios, including military host nation support and critical transport under difficult conditions. The overall purpose of the exercises is to strengthen total defence and Sweden's resilience.