Jean-Paul Monet, Pierre Schaller, Sergio Pirone, Marc Castellnou Ribau, Stéphane Poyau, & Marc Dumas. (2020). Civil Protection in Europe: Towards a Unified Command System? Lessons Learned, Studies and Ideas About Change Management. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 315–325). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: After the summer 2017 deadly wildfires in Portugal, President Juncker of the European Commission asked for “a stronger European Union (EU)”, clearly targeting civil protection management. This wish found achievement in the March 2019 guidance to establish a reserve of EU response capacities called “rescEU”, integrated into the jurisdictional basis of EU civil protection. However, the authors regret the ambition of this plan has not been fulfilled. Due to some very “European constraints” this “new deal” has introduced only small changes in terms of resources and knowledge management. In each of the past several years, climate change has brought new examples of fatal natural disasters: wildfires in Sweden, and Greece, and flash floods in Spain and France. Because of this continuous rise in disasters, and based on some lessons learned, the authors stress that it's now time to shape a project to improve European Civil Protection. The idea is to move from the already good modular system of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism to an integrated, robust, and unique European Command System, which clearly must be fully interoperable with other existing mechanisms (US ICS, UNOCHA...).
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