EU solidarity in disasters: the Solidarity Fund and rescEU

International cooperation tends to work where it has three things: a rule that says who must help whom, a budget, and people and equipment that can be sent. Debates about global governance often stall on the first. Disaster response in Europe is one of the few areas where all three exist at once, and that makes it a useful test of how far solidarity between states can go in practice. The answer is: further than anywhere else, and not as far as the word suggests.

EU solidarity in disasters rests on a treaty article and two main instruments. Article 222 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the solidarity clause, requires the Union and its Member States to act jointly “in a spirit of solidarity” when a Member State is the victim of a natural or man-made disaster. The meaning of that clause is discussed in the piece on what solidarity means. Here the subject is the machinery: the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, which sends help in the first hours and days, and the EU Solidarity Fund, which sends money months later.

The chart above shows some of the largest grants the Solidarity Fund has made. Every one of them relates to a disaster since 2016, and four of the five were floods.

The EU Solidarity Fund: origins and legal basis

The fund was created in 2002, after the floods that summer in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and France, and its legal basis is Council Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002. It has been amended twice in ways that matter for disasters.

• 2014. Regulation (EU) No 661/2014 of 15 May 2014 simplified the rules, clarified the eligibility criteria and, for the first time, allowed advance payments. The European Parliament’s fact sheet on the fund says the reform aimed to improve the fund’s response time and gave new attention to disaster prevention and risk management.
• 2020. Regulation (EU) 2020/461 of 30 March 2020 extended the fund to major public health emergencies, in response to COVID-19, and raised the ceiling for advances from 10% of the expected grant (at most €30m) to 25% (at most €100m).

According to the Commission’s regional policy department, the fund has since 2002 mobilised over €9.6bn for 110 natural disasters and 20 health-emergency interventions, helping 24 Member States, the UK while it was a member, and 4 accession countries. The European Parliament’s fact sheet of April 2026 gives over €8.6bn actually paid out. The annual ceiling of the reserve the fund draws on was €1,016m in 2018 prices (€1,144.2m in 2024 prices), according to the Commission’s proposal of 27 August 2024.

Who qualifies: the thresholds

A disaster has to be big enough, measured in total direct damage, before a country can apply. The current categories, as summarised by the Commission:

All grants are capped at the cost of the eligible operations.

Worked example: Emilia-Romagna, May 2023

The floods of May 2023 in Emilia-Romagna show how the formula works. According to the Commission’s proposal of 27 August 2024, Italy declared €8,533m of direct damage, against a major-disaster threshold for Italy of about €3.8bn.

1. Damage up to the threshold: 2.5% of €3,800m is €95m.
2. Damage above the threshold: €8,533m minus €3,800m is €4,733m; 6% of that is about €284m.
3. Total: roughly €379m.

The actual grant for Emilia-Romagna was €378.8m, plus €67.8m for Tuscany. The Emilia-Romagna case study puts the grant next to the insured loss, which was €495m out of an economic loss of €9bn according to PERILS.

How a grant is applied for and paid

The procedure has six steps, and the length of the chain explains most of the complaints about the fund.

1. Application. Only national authorities can apply, within 12 weeks of the first damage. Individuals, companies and regions cannot.
2. Assessment. The Commission checks the damage figures and eligibility, and may ask for more information.
3. Advance. If the state requests it and money is available, the Commission can pay an advance of up to 25% of the expected grant, capped at €100m.
4. Proposal and budget approval. The Commission proposes an amount, which the European Parliament and the Council must approve as an amendment to the EU budget. The Parliament’s fact sheet notes that this can take several months.
5. Payment and use. Once paid, the grant must be used within 18 months.
6. Reporting. Within six months after that period the state reports on how the money was used, including any insurance settlements or other compensation received for the same operations.

What can the money pay for? According to the Commission, restoring infrastructure and plant in energy, water and waste water, telecommunications, transport, health and education; temporary accommodation and rescue services; securing preventive infrastructure and protecting cultural heritage; and cleaning up disaster areas. Much of it is reimbursement for work already done.

The critique: grants arrive slowly

Slowness has been the main criticism of the fund since its early years. In 2008 the European Court of Auditors concluded that the fund “did not provide a rapid response”, with about a year between application and payment as the usual pattern. The European Parliament later criticised what it called the “unacceptably long time” it took to provide aid, in a 2013 resolution recalled in its fact sheet. The 2014 and 2020 reforms tried to answer this with advances.

Recent cases show how much has changed and how much has not:

The Ahr valley grant for Germany, €612.6m, was approved sixteen months after the flood. Even the advance to Cyprus, which the Commission described as budgetary relief “at a time when it is most needed”, came four and a half months after the fires began. Defenders of the fund point out that part of the time is used by the applicants themselves, who have to document damage across every affected municipality before they can submit, and that reimbursement after the fact is the fund’s intended role. Critics answer that a fund called solidarity should not feel like an audit.

Both are partly right. The fund’s own design pays for public recovery work that takes years in any case. But for a regional government that has already paid contractors to rebuild bridges, a year’s wait for a European contribution is a real cost.

The Union Civil Protection Mechanism and rescEU

Where the Solidarity Fund is slow money, the Civil Protection Mechanism is fast help. It was set up in October 2001 and brings together the EU Member States and ten participating states: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Türkiye and Ukraine. According to the Commission’s civil-protection department, it had been activated more than 880 times since 2002, 64 times in 2025.

The process starts with a request from the affected country to the Emergency Response Coordination Centre in Brussels, which monitors emergencies around the clock and passes the request to other participating states. They decide what to offer. The Commission coordinates and contributes to transport and operational costs: in the Belgian floods of July 2021 it said it would finance up to 75% of the transport costs, and a French flood rescue team and helicopter were mobilised the same day Belgium asked.

Two layers sit behind the basic Mechanism:

• The European Civil Protection Pool, established in 2013, holds teams and equipment that states commit in advance and that are tested and certified. As of September 2025 it held 153 response capacities, 118 of them certified.
• rescEU, created in 2019, is fully financed by the EU. It includes firefighting planes and helicopters, a medical evacuation plane, emergency medical teams and stockpiles of medical and CBRN equipment. Funding has been allocated for 12 new firefighting planes, to be based in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Greece, and 5 helicopters.

In Valencia in November 2024, the Mechanism brought a French team of 50 responders with 29 specialised vehicles and a Portuguese team of 102 personnel with 30 vehicles, and the Copernicus satellite service had produced more than 60 maps for flood delineation and damage assessment by 20 November, according to the Commission. The Valencia case study and the piece on community solidarity after floods describe how that help met the volunteers already on the ground.

What EU solidarity does not cover

The gaps are as important as the instruments, because they decide who actually pays.

• Private losses. The Solidarity Fund does not compensate households or businesses. A family whose house was destroyed gets nothing from it directly.
• Insurable damage. The fund covers only non-insurable damage. If a loss could have been insured, the EU expects insurance to pay for it.
• Prevention. Investments in prevention are not eligible, although the 2014 reform placed new emphasis on prevention and risk management.
• Most of the bill. Even the largest grants are a small share of the damage. Spain declared €20.28bn of direct damage from the Valencia floods and the Commission accepted €18.08bn as plausible; the grant of €946m covered about 5% of that. By 27 March 2026 Spain’s own Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros had paid €4,378,657,847 on DANA claims, more than four times the EU grant.
• Small disasters. Floods that devastate a few towns but fall below the thresholds receive nothing from the fund.

The EU has tried to fill some of these gaps with other money. For Valencia, the Commission combined the Solidarity Fund grant with €645m of reallocated cohesion funds under RESTORE, bringing total EU support to nearly €1.6bn. After Storm Boris in September 2024, it proposed €280.7m for six countries in May 2025, with Czechia receiving the largest share, €114m, followed by Poland with €76m.

For everything else, the money comes from national budgets and from insurance. The national catastrophe schemes explain how Spain, France and others organise that second layer, and the protection gap shows how much of Europe’s disaster loss is still carried by nobody but the people who suffer it.

Slovenia’s grant for its August 2023 floods, €428.4m, included a €100m advance, the maximum the 2020 rules allow, according to the Commission’s Panorama magazine in June 2026.