The EU needs a new target: zero deaths from natural disasters (why the European Parliament resolution on floods matters)

As families lost loved ones, owners lost businesses, farmers lost crops and mayors lost infrastructure, last 48 hours went by hectically as our team co-drafted and negotiated today’s European Parliament resolution on the recent floods. We achieved unprecedented focus on regional and local level and it is now adopted in plenary.

Our team’s authorship in the text:

1. Calls on the Commission to provide technical and financial support to regions disproportionately affected by climate change, including through the cohesion policy instrument, ensuring that no Member State or region is left behind in the efforts to enhance climate resilience and disaster preparedness; highlights the importance of aid and financial resources being made available in the affected areas in as quick, easy and flexible a manner as possible;
2. Calls for strengthening of EU investments linked to regional and local resilience in the next MFF, notably under cohesion policy; acknowledges the need for built-in crisis flexibility; proposes the creation of a dedicated priority axis under cohesion policy for local and regional authorities to address emerging priorities in a bottom-up process, initiated at regional and local level; considers that the key principle should be a tailor-made investment approach geared towards specific needs on the ground;
3. Calls for investments in climate adaptation and disaster prevention and preparedness to be guaranteed either through a dedicated policy objective under regional development and cohesion, thematic concentration or a specific enabling condition so as to ensure sustainable investments in local and regional infrastructure, and risk management in less-developed urban and rural areas, including border regions, islands and the outermost regions;
4. Acknowledges that the EU’s cohesion policy should place a further focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation; emphasises the importance of designing and maintaining tailor-made EU programmes and measures for the regions at higher-risk of natural disasters; considers that regional investments through the EU budget should remain under shared management for programming and implementation in order to be able to respond to the needs of Member States, regions and urban, rural and remote areas, especially in view of adapting urban and rural areas to new challenges such as floods;
5. Underlines that technical, financial and administrative capacities are essential in ensuring that managing bodies and local and regional authorities acquire technical knowledge, especially on climate change, that they can use for urban and rural planning and management; is convinced that this will lead to improved design and evaluation of project proposals, more effective allocation of resources and satisfactory budget implementation without a significant risk of decommitments of EU investments;
6. Calls for existing technical assistance and advisory programmes to specifically target smaller municipalities and cross-border, remote and rural areas, as well as the outermost and island regions, to help them face new challenges such as the green transition and climate change; underlines, in this respect, the importance of technical assistance instruments being developed in collaboration between the European Investment Bank and the Commission;
7. Calls for targeted support in the form of 100?% EU financing for technical, financial and administrative capacity building, project design and preparation, project pipeline identification and development, and strategic planning capabilities, including planning instruments;
8. Calls for Commission initiatives, such as the EU Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, to be more involved in the process of designing and implementing the next generation of disaster preparedness investments;
9. Acknowledges that policy and implementation support, geared towards mayors and local authorities, generates significantly better outcomes in the context of policy implementation; calls for an enhanced place-based approach to bring regional EU investment management closer to the regional and local level.

Moving on to the upcoming confirmation hearings for the commissioner-designates to ensure follow-up. Keep your fingers crossed.