In October 2003 the European Commission will hold a special press briefing on “managing rivers and floods” to outline the efforts It has made.  Their new leaflet “Floods” warns that it is wrong to think we can control or prevent floods – we can only manage them.  The EU is moving from traditional “heavy structural interventions” such as dams, dykes and barriers to a comprehensive mitigation strategy: enhancing forecasting and river management decision-making and techniques.

WHEN CAN THE EU OFFER ASSISTANCE?

EU assistance can be offered to people inside and outside EU borders when they are hit by major disasters.

To qualify for aid, countries must provide an estimate of the total damage caused by the disaster and an estimate of the cost of the actions, which are to be part-financed by the Solidarity Fund.  This money can be used to meet the cost or urgent actions.  The Fund cannot, however, be used to compensate for damage covered by private insurance or by other European and international funding sources.

WHAT IS CONSIDERED TO BE A MAJOR DISASTER?

An event is considered a ‘major disaster’ if it causes damage of over Euro 3 billion or more than 0.6% of the country’s gross national income.  In exceptional circumstances, an individual region can also benefit from assistance where it has been hit by an exceptional disaster whose repercussions have serious lasting effects on the living conditions and economic stability of the majority of its population.

WHAT IS THE SOLIDARITY FUND BUDGET?

Annually this is Euro 1 billion of which Euro 75 million is earmarked for regional disasters.  25% is set aside until 1st October to cover possible needs during the final months of the year.

SOLIDARITY FUND INTERVENTIONS

OPTIONS AVAILABLE FOR SUMMER 2003 FOREST FIRE DAMAGE IN PORTUGAL

Portugal’s allocation of Structural Funds under the Community Support Framework for 2000-2006 is Euro 20.535 million.  Member States may change programming priorities and allocation of the funding available in programmes.  In any event Portugal set aside Euro 500 million plus for the 2000-2006 programming period as a reserve for unforeseen situations.

Portuguese authorities may wish to set up Cohesion Fund projects to deal with the consequence of the fires.  European programmes support rural development in Portugal for a total cost of Euro 3.560 million.  About Euro 40 million is earmarked for sustainable forest management and implementing forest fire prevention measures.  The Commission has approved certain derogations from the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of extreme drought in certain Member States.  Farmers are being allowed to use set-aside land to feed animals.  Requests for assistance between member states are channelled through the European Commission’s “Civil Protection Response Centre”.  (In Portugal’s case this produced 2 Canadairs from Italy and 2 helicopters from Germany.)  A further source of funding is State Aid which can compensate up to 100% in cases of natural  disaster.  This must exclude other payments received such as insurance.

The Commission’s proposed “Forest Focus” scheme, currently with the Council and European Parliament, would provide Euro 52 million for data collection and the assessment of Europe’s forests.  The Commission has already developed a European Forest Fire Information Service which distributes maps daily to Member State authorities showing which are risk areas.  The EFFIS service supplements national information.

http://natural-hazards.jrc.it/effis

More information on what the Commission terms “instruments of solidarity” may be found on http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/index_en.htm

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE HAS ASSESSED PORTUGAL'S WORST FOREST FIRE SEASON:

Some 355,976 hectares (ha) of land had been burnt in Portugal by 20 August 2003, of which 301.80 ha  was forest, according to figures derived from satellite observations by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC).  The forest industry accounts for 6.5% of Portugal’s exports.  The JRC used its remote-sensing expertise to map the extent of damage. These figures show that almost 6% of the forest area in Portugal was damaged, twice that of the most severe year since 1980. It is equivalent to the total annual burnt area of all 5 Mediterranean countries in recent years. Blazes destroyed vast stretches of forests and shrub land in at least 5 of the 18 districts on the Portuguese mainland, claiming 18 lives.

European-wide collaboration: Collaboration with the relevant services of Member States has existed since 1998.  It is coordinated by the Civil Protection Unit of DG Environment at the European Commission, with the aim of developing a European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). This summer’s catastrophic events spurred the JRC INFOREST group to activate the European Forest Fires Damage Assessment System (EFFDAS) before the end of the 2003 fire season. As part of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, the group is working on development and implementation of advanced methods for evaluation of forest fire risk and for estimating the extent of burnt areas in the EU. DG Environment and the Joint Research Centre have established, as part of EFFIS, the European Forest Fire Risk Forecasting System (EFFRFS), to provide a pan-European approach to the evaluation of long-term and short-term forest fire risks. EFFRFS uses special indices for the evaluation of the fire risk, among them the Fire Potential Index (FPI) that takes into account differences between regions, forest vegetation types and dynamic variables such as the vegetation's relative greenness and meteorological conditions. See web site: http://natural-hazards.jrc.it/fires/  mentioned above.

RESULTS   (1) Total mapped burnt area as distributed through the Portuguese administrative districts

 (2) Distribution of the burnt area by land-use type

Research on Forest fires has been supported by the EU since the late 1980's, through its Framework Programmes (FP) for Research and Technological Development. Since 1999, at the start of FP4, over two dozen European projects have been funded with an EU contribution of approximately € 23.5 million.  These have grouped together partners from over 15 countries.

Research results that are being used operationally derive from multinational and multidisciplinary research consortia from several projects including MINERVE, FIERS, RAPSODI, FIMEX (http://www.wagner.de ), ACRE, ERAS ( http://www.eu-eras.org )  and SPREAD (  http://www.algosystems.gr/spread ) . WARM (http://www.euwarm.org ) investigates fires at the wild land-urban interface, in particular assessing the fire resistance of different building materials.

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