EU to strengthen disaster response preparedness

The European Commission has adopted a communication on reinforcing the European Union's disaster response capacity. In order to rise to the changing challenges posed by natural and man-made disasters, the communication proposes that the European Union strengthens its abilities at home and abroad to provide civil protection and humanitarian assistance. As a first step, the Commission has undertaken a screening exercise of all its existing resources and has developed an action plan of specific measures to be implemented before the end of 2008.

The President of the Commission José Manuel Barroso stated: "We can only protect our citizens and help others if we act together in solidarity. When responding to such disasters, Europe, as in so many other ways, is strongest when we combine our capacities and profit from our diversity and different expertise.”

Today's threats are often of a cross-border nature and require multilateral and coordinated responses. At the same time boundaries between internal and external threats are increasingly blurred: the Indian Ocean Tsunami affected European tourists as well as the local populations, floods and fires affect both EU Member States and neighbouring countries, and epidemics can spread from one continent to another. The EC believes that a new approach to disaster response is needed to respond to these changes.

The communication that has been adopted includes the following proposals:

* To transform the European Union's civil protection mechanism (Monitoring and Information Centre-MIC) into a genuine operational centre and beef it up with reserve resources, i.e. stand by modules or complementary European resources.

* To reinforce humanitarian aid by filling existing delivery gaps, strengthening the global response capacity (in particular UN and Red Cross movement) and improving coordination with the various humanitarian actors.

* To set up a European-wide Disaster Response Training Network building on the experience of the Member States in civil protection training.

* To improve disaster preparedness measures both within the EU and in third countries, early warning systems (e.g. for tsunamis in the Mediterranean) and use of the single European Emergency System, 112.

* A strong call for enhanced inter-institutional cooperation with deployment, where appropriate, of joint planning and operational teams to ‘deal with particular disasters involving different instruments’.

The communication deliberately uses the term ‘disaster’ in a broad sense to cover both natural and man-made disasters, taking place within and/or outside the European Union.

A copy of the communication can be found here.

•Date: 6th March 2008• Region:W.Europe/UK •Type: Article •Topic: DR general
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