Firefighting - the next pillar of European integration?

In July, the EU put forward a major package of climate legislation. As part of the 'European Green Deal', the EU is striving to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. To reach this goal, draft laws have been presented on tightening and expanding its carbon market, boosting the use of renewables and cleaning up the transport sector. 

But even though this series of bold initiatives place the EU at the forefront of global climate leadership, they will only demonstrate their impact over time. Ultimately these are policies to tackle the climate change that could be in our future if we do not take action today. They are ideas to secure the 2030s and 2040s more than the 2020s.

Unfortunately, globally governments and corporations have been much too slow to act in responding to the threat of climate change. We therefore already have many years worth of climate change stored up for us as we have allowed the planet's temperature to rise (over 1°C so far, already bringing us very close to the 1.5°C limit).

In Europe, therefore, we are likely going to continue to see the kinds of severe weather events that have marked this year. Whether it involves flooding in parts of Northeastern Europe or raging wildfires in the South, these events are unlikely to go away any time soon - the latest IPCC report told us as much. Countries that are seeing these disasters now may experience them more regularly and even more severely, while for their neighbours, the TV bulletins of today may be a look into their own futures. EU scientists have now identified the Mediterannean as a 'wildfire hotspot' as a result of rising global temperatures.

Contrary to some claims, there are policies to tackle this in place already. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism has been operational for around 20 years now. For participating countries (all EU states, plus Iceland, Norway, Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Turkey), the Mechanism helps spread costs and coordinate the crisis response when a country has been overwhelmed and requests aid. In addition, since 2019, following particularly devastating fires in Portugal and Greece, the EU added the 'RescEU reserve', a pool of resources to help tackle these kinds of disasters, including medical teams, experts, specialised equipment and transportation.

But it is true to say that these are simply the foundations of an answer to the coming challenges - as the EU has evolved in response to crises before, so it will need to evolve in response to the crisis of climate change. 

Possibly the most important improvement will be the ability to respond at speed and with greater scale. This may entail a more automatic response from EU states in deploying their own capacities or it may be that the current system should be switched round - rather than an EU reserve capacity to bolster the assistance provided by national governments, maybe the EU resources should be the first responders (in effect requiring significant full-time EU emergency response units for various kinds of disasters). 

Second, the EU's early warning system should be further built out and improved. Fortunately, the EU already has a satellite programme to provide the relevant support and legislators must ensure this continues to be well-funded and resourced. But the way that information is handled and the procedures of national governments need reform (as was demonstrated by the failure of the satellite data to really impact governments in Belgium and Germany prior to the recent floods). 

Finally the EU should take a second look at the Solidarity Fund. Today it functions essentially as a top-up to help manage the costs associated with various emergencies and disasters. The payouts are often small compared to the total value of the damage caused and can take many months to come through. As climate disasters become more common and more severe, the need will grow for a real disaster fund that is more proactive and with a more significant budget to back it up, taking on board a greater proportion of the costs.

It may be that the EU does reform in exactly this direction or the reforms to its policies for dealing with climate disasters may take a different form. But a bigger EU role remains likely and in stepping up to the frontline of emergency policy, it is possible that something about the EU's nature will change too. 

It can be argued that one of the big differences between the European and American experiences of integration is that the US states had very little in the way of social support and policies when they went through the process of uniting into a federation. By contrast, European states have well-developed welfare systems that citizens will be reluctant to pool with others, arguably placing a limit on the degree of potential integration.

The growing European role in fighting the climate emergency, both in cutting emissions for the future and in responding to disasters today, shows that this way of thinking may be too narrow. It is true that there is likely little or limited value-added from the EU in social support, where Europe's nation-states are already well established. But what we are perhaps now discovering is that the healthcare and unemployment payments of tomorrow may in fact take the form of large-scale disaster relief and early warning systems. Driven by the imperatives of climate change, it could be that, along with the euro, Schengen and Frontex, the Civil Protection Mechanism becomes a new pillar of European integration - an essentially European policy that has a tangible role in people's lives. 

In this sense, perhaps the American experience holds more lessons than first appearances may suggest. Perhaps it is FEMA, rather than the NHS, which will be the model for cementing the European Union.