Workshop: Financing natural disaster losses in the European Union – the role of insurance and the European Solidarity Fund

Recent policy developments, including the consultation initiated by the European Commission’s green paper on insurance of natural and man-made disasters, as well as the reform process of the European Solidarity Fund (EUSF) highlighted the diverse views on disaster risk management and financing disaster losses in particular, for instance the adequacy of the insurance market to cover disaster losses in the EU and the efficiency of the EUSF. In fact, European governments typically still absorb a large portion of disaster losses. And even with the backup from the EUSF, research has shown that many local insurers and governments, especially of small and hazard-prone Member States, lack capacity to cover large-scale and multiple disasters. In the context of the EU FP7 ENHANCE project, experts at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) together with partners are assessing the financial vulnerability of the European Union to flood risk and investigating its disaster risk financing framework.