The Importance of Solidarity: Why It Matters Most When Disasters Strike

Solidarity matters because nobody can carry every risk alone. A household cannot save enough to rebuild after a flood that comes once a century, a town cannot keep a fleet of water bombers for the one summer it burns, and a small country cannot fund reconstruction after an earthquake that wipes out a fifth of its output. When people and states agree in advance to share those losses, the cost of the worst year is spread across many good years and many unaffected neighbours. That is the plain answer to the question of why is solidarity important, and it holds whether the people sharing are neighbours on a street or governments at a summit table.

The answer has a harder second half. Solidarity is cheap to declare and expensive to honour. Most days it costs nothing. On the day the river rises, it suddenly has a price, and the people who pay it are rarely the people who need it. So the question of why is solidarity important has to be answered twice: once for the principle, and once for the bill.

Why solidarity matters between people and between states

Between individuals, solidarity rests on a simple recognition: my safety depends partly on yours. The neighbour whose house floods today is the one who shovels mud out of your cellar next spring. Sociologists have argued for more than a century about where this bond comes from, whether from shared identity or from mutual dependence, and the companion piece on what solidarity means goes into that debate.

Between states, the logic is the same but the stakes are larger. Countries trade, share rivers and airspace, and send their citizens across each other’s borders every day. A disaster in one of them spills over: the 2010 ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull grounded flights across the continent, and the July 2021 floods ran through Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria within a few days. Governments that help each other in such moments are buying a form of insurance for themselves.

There is also a political reason. The importance of solidarity in international relations shows most clearly when a promise is kept under pressure. A state that sends rescue teams to a neighbour in July can ask for them in October. Trust built that way is harder to break than trust built on communiqués.

The European Union wrote this into its founding treaties. Article 222 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union says that the Union and its Member States “shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity” if a Member State is the victim of a natural or man-made disaster, and that the other Member States shall assist it at the request of its political authorities. Few treaty articles are that direct.

What solidarity looks like when disasters hit

In practice, solidarity in disasters takes four shapes. They differ in who pays, when the decision is made, and how much the victim can count on.

1. Neighbourly help in the first days. Volunteers, local clubs, churches and fire brigades. Fast, generous and unreliable in scale. The community response to floods is often what people remember most.
2. Cross-border operational aid. Rescue teams, pumps, aircraft and maps sent by other states. In the EU this runs through the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, which the European Commission’s civil-protection department says had been activated more than 880 times since 2002, including 64 times in 2025.
3. Shared public money after the event. National reconstruction funds and, at EU level, the EU Solidarity Fund, which pays part of the public emergency costs. The EU disaster solidarity instruments are covered in their own piece.
4. Shared risk pools before the event. Insurance schemes in which everyone pays in every year and the unlucky few are paid out. This is the least visible form and, in money terms, often the largest.

The first form is spontaneous. The other three are organised, which is the point: organised solidarity does not depend on how a disaster plays on the evening news.

Insurance as organised solidarity

Insurance is usually described as a private contract. In the natural-catastrophe field it is also one of the main ways a society shares disaster losses. Every household that pays a premium and never claims is helping to pay for the household that does.

How much solidarity an insurance system carries depends on how the price is set. Europe has run the experiment in several directions, and the national catastrophe schemes show the range:

Take the Spanish case as a worked example. Under the Resolution of 28 March 2018 published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the Consorcio surcharge on a home is 0.07 per thousand of the sum insured. A flat insured for €200,000 therefore pays about €14 a year towards extraordinary risks, whether it sits on a hilltop in Burgos or beside a ravine in the province of Valencia. After the October 2024 DANA floods, the Consorcio had paid €4,378,657,847 on 212,237 claims by 27 March 2026, according to SegurosNews reporting the Consorcio’s figures. That money came from surcharges collected across the whole country over decades, not from Valencian policyholders alone.

The UK takes a different route. Flood Re, set up under the Water Act 2014, charges insurers a fixed premium for the flood element of eligible home policies according to Council Tax band. For 2026/27 the combined premium is £205 for Band A and £1,613 for Band H, according to Flood Re. Flood risk does not enter that price. The gap between what flood-exposed homes would cost and what they pay is met partly by a levy on all UK home insurers, £160m a year from April 2025, which reaches every household with home insurance. The Flood Re scheme page sets out the details.

The trade-off with risk-based pricing

Here is the uncomfortable part. Solidarity in pricing has a cost, and it is not only financial.

A flat premium sends no signal. If the house beside the river pays the same as the house on the hill, nothing in the price tells anyone to build higher, fit flood doors or move. Norges Bank made this argument about the Norwegian pool in a staff memo published on 8 January 2026: a uniform premium weakens incentives for prevention. Critics of the Spanish system make the same point, and the French Sénat has proposed lowering the deductible for policyholders who take prevention measures, which is an attempt to bring some signal back without abandoning the flat rate.

Risk-based pricing has the opposite problem. It is accurate and it is harsh. In Germany, where natural-hazard cover is a voluntary add-on priced by risk, the insurers’ association GDV has said that more than 400,000 residential buildings face prohibitively expensive premiums, as reported by Artemis in December 2025. Those households tend to go uninsured. When the flood comes, the state usually steps in with ad hoc aid, as it did after July 2021 with a reconstruction fund of up to €30bn. Solidarity happens anyway, only later, through taxes and without anyone having agreed the terms in advance.

That is the real choice, and it is where the importance of solidarity stops being a slogan and becomes a design decision. Ask an underwriter and a finance minister to rank solidarity importance against price accuracy, and they will give different answers for good reasons. The underwriter worries about incentives; the minister worries about the bill that arrives when incentives fail. The evidence from Europe suggests that the bill arrives either way, which is why solidarity importance is easier to measure after a flood than before one.

The size of the uninsured share makes the choice concrete. The European Environment Agency put climate-related losses in the EU-27 at €822bn over 1980–2024, with less than 20% privately insured. EIOPA, the EU insurance supervisor, says in its 2025 dashboard summary that only around a quarter of the losses in Europe were insured over the same period. The rest is the protection gap, and it is filled, imperfectly, by savings, debt, public budgets and goodwill.

Flood Re offers one compromise. It subsidises flood cover for existing homes but excludes homes built after 1 January 2009, so the solidarity does not extend to new building in risky places, and it is designed to close in 2039, when the market is expected to price flood risk on its own. Whether that exit is realistic is a separate argument. Flood Re’s own 2025–26 annual report describes the pressures on it as “structural rather than cyclical”.

Solidarity between states: the EU layer

Above national schemes sits a thinner layer of solidarity between governments. It works on two tracks.

The operational track is the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, set up in October 2001. A country overwhelmed by a disaster asks for help through the Emergency Response Coordination Centre in Brussels, and other participating states offer teams and equipment. Since 2019 the EU has also funded its own reserve, rescEU, which includes firefighting planes and helicopters.

The financial track is the EU Solidarity Fund, created in 2002 after floods in Central Europe. It pays part of the public costs of emergency and recovery work after a major disaster. According to the Commission’s regional policy department, it has mobilised over €9.6bn for 110 natural disasters and 20 health emergencies. The largest grant was €1.2bn for Italy after the 2016–17 earthquakes; the second was €946m for Spain after the Valencia floods, part of nearly €1.6bn in EU support announced on 10 March 2025.

Those are large numbers in absolute terms and small ones in proportion. Spain declared €20.28bn of direct damage from the Valencia floods, and the Commission accepted €18.08bn as plausible. The Solidarity Fund grant covered about 5% of that accepted figure. The fund is designed that way: it does not compensate private losses and it does not pay for damage that could have been insured. Its role is to show that a disaster in one Member State is a concern of all of them, and to share the public cost at the margin.

The importance of solidarity when the money is short

Solidarity is easiest to defend in the abstract and hardest to defend in a budget negotiation. Every system described here faces pressure from the same direction. Losses from floods, storms and drought have risen: the EEA reports that average annual losses climbed from €8.6bn in the 1980s to €44.9bn in 2020–2024. Pools built on flat rates need higher rates, and governments that promised help need bigger reserves.

The French CatNat surcharge rose from 12% to 20% of the property premium on 1 January 2025, a decision published on 28 December 2023, because the old rate no longer covered the claims. Norway’s pool ended 2025 with a deficit of about NOK 655m. Those adjustments are the unglamorous side of the importance of solidarity: someone has to agree to pay more, before the next disaster, for a loss that may fall on someone else.

There is no clean answer to how far that should go. A society can choose high solidarity and weak price signals, as Spain and France largely have, or strong signals and a larger uninsured share, as Germany has until now. Germany’s Justice Minister said on 28 September 2026 that new building policies there will have to include natural-hazard cover, with an opt-out, which moves the country some way towards the first model. The draft bill is expected in the first quarter of 2027, and the debate over who pays for the 400,000 hardest cases is not settled.