European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF)
A European budget fund that grants member states hit by a major disaster aid toward emergency public spending, without ever compensating private losses.
When a disaster exceeds a damage threshold set relative to national income, the affected state can apply for European aid. The fund does not work like insurance: there is no premium and no automatic entitlement, and each grant is voted by Parliament and the Council on a proposal from the Commission, which takes months. It finances only a closed list of public expenses: restoring infrastructure, emergency housing, rescue services, protection of cultural heritage. Losses of households and businesses are excluded, precisely because they belong to insurance. The fund thus cushions the state's budget shock but does nothing to reduce the private protection gap, and its limited annual envelope leaves it exposed to a year of back-to-back disasters.
Created in November 2002 after that summer's floods in Central Europe, the fund first mobilized about €728 million, including €444 million for Germany. Its largest intervention remains the one approved in 2017 for the central Italy earthquakes of August 2016 to January 2017: €1.197 billion, against damage estimated at about €22 billion.
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