French Natural Disaster Compensation Act of December 28, 2021

The law of December 28, 2021 on compensation for natural disasters (No. 2021-1837), known as the Baudu Act, is the reform that reworked the deadlines, transparency and scope of France's 1982 CatNat scheme without touching its solidarity principle. It carries the name of Stéphane Baudu, the member of parliament who introduced it after years of droughts in which owners of cracked houses waited for answers that never came. On procedure, towns now have twenty-four months after the event to request recognition, up from eighteen. Each prefecture names a natural disaster point of contact. The interministerial commission gets a statutory basis and must state reasons for its opinions, and a national advisory commission on natural disasters is set up to monitor the criteria. On the policyholder side, the deadline to report a claim once the order is published goes from ten to thirty days. Emergency rehousing costs come into the cover, as does part of the architect and project management fees needed for repairs. The deductible modulation based on the number of orders is dropped for individuals and businesses; it survives only for property insured by local authorities. On drought, the follow-up came from another text: the 3DS law of February 21, 2022 authorized the government to legislate by ordinance, which produced the ordinance of February 8, 2023 on clay shrink-swell. Several measures had to wait for implementing decrees, which pushed back their actual effect on policies. Practitioners point out that the law tightened insurers' obligations without changing what most often blocks a claim: a refusal of recognition upstream, over which the insurer has no say.