The European Union Solidarity Fund

KEY POINTS

Conditions for intervention

• As a general rule, the EUSF can provide financial aid if total direct damage caused by a disaster exceeds €3 billion (at 2011 prices) or 0.6% of an EU country’s gross national income (GNI), whichever is lower.
• Regulation (EU) 2020/461 extends Regulation (EU) 2012/2002 to cover a major public health emergency which means any life-threatening or otherwise serious hazard to health of biological origin in an eligible country seriously affecting human health and requiring decisive action to contain its further spread. To qualify, this emergency would result in a public financial burden inflicted on the eligible country for emergency response measures estimated at over €1.5 billion (at 2011 prices), or more than 0.3% of its GNI.
• Although major disasters are the EUSF’s main focus, help is also available for more limited regional disasters, for which the eligibility threshold is 1.5% of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP), or 1% for an outermost region.

Disaster prevention and risk management strategies

The new rules encourage EU countries to put in place disaster prevention and risk management strategies by requiring reports before and after applications. If affected countries repeatedly fail to implement EU law on disaster risk prevention they risk having aid reduced or refused.

Eligible countries

The EUSF covers EU countries and countries in the course of negotiating EU membership.

What is the EUSF used for?

• The EUSF supplements countries’ own public expenditure to finance essential emergency operations. These include:
  • restoring essential infrastructure e.g. energy, water, health and education;
  • temporary accommodation and costs of emergency services to meet immediate needs;
  • securing of prevention infrastructures, such as dams;
  • measures to protect cultural heritage;
  • clean-up operations; and
  • measures aiming at rapidly providing assistance, including medical assistance, to the population affected by a major public health emergency and to protect it from the risk of being affected, including prevention, monitoring or control of the spread of diseases, combating severe risks to public health or mitigating their impact on public health.
• EUSF payments are limited to financing measures alleviating non-insurable damage and must be recovered if the cost of repairing the damage is subsequently met by a third party.

Applications for assistance

• The affected country must apply to the European Commission within 12 weeks of a disaster. Financial aid proposed by the Commission must then be approved by the Council and the European Parliament.
• Specific details concerning applications to address the COVID-19 outbreak are available on a dedicated website.

Budget

• The EUSF is funded outside the EU’s normal budget, that is, by additional money raised by EU countries (see the Interinstitutional agreement of December 2013 and summary). The maximum annual budget is €500 million (2011 prices), plus any funds remaining from the preceding year.