Christos Stylianides on disaster risk reduction

Christos Stylianides became European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management on 1 November 2014. He had been EU Ebola Coordinator from October 2014 and before that a Member of the European Parliament and spokesperson for the government of Cyprus. The ENHANCE e-news alert of March 2016 announced the interview.

His theme was disaster risk reduction in Europe after the Sendai Framework 2015-2030. He placed disaster risk management at the core of sustainable development and climate policy and made a plain economic argument: prevention lowers the cost of response.

On the EU’s own tools he said that the Union Civil Protection Mechanism treats prevention, preparedness and response as equal priorities, and he announced a forthcoming EU Action Plan on implementing Sendai. He also mentioned the national risk assessments carried out under the Civil Protection Mechanism and the new EU Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC).

Insurance took up a large part of the interview. European average annual disaster losses had risen from about EUR 9 billion in the 1980s to over EUR 13 billion in the 2000s, yet uptake of disaster insurance remained low. He referred to the follow-up to the Commission’s 2013 Green Paper and to support for the G7 goal on climate insurance.

The EU instruments he described are covered in the article on EU solidarity in disasters, and the insurance shortfall on the protection gap page. The framework is summarised in the glossary.