Friday, July 16, 2021
Don’t wait for climate successes
Investments in disaster control required
During the flood disaster, helpers and volunteers showed tireless efforts. In the future, Germany should be better prepared for any exceptional situations. The Federal Office for Disaster Assistance is therefore calling for massive investments.
The President of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Aid (BBK), Armin Schuster, has called for massive investments in crisis prevention in view of the flood tragedy with more than a hundred deaths. “Corona and the recent storms made it very clear in a very short time that issues of acute crisis prevention must be treated with the same priority as the fight against climate change,” he told the editorial network Germany.
“We cannot solve the problem of climate change on our own anyway,” said Schuster. “And as long as we don’t have any solutions, we have to invest with all our might in civil protection, resilience and crisis prevention.” To do this, we now need a common political will. “We cannot wait until we are successful in terms of climate policy,” he said. The expectations of the Federal Office and the Technical Relief Organization are currently immense. “In this relationship, our expectations of the Federal Finance Minister are immense,” said Schuster.
“All at one table”
The interior ministers’ conference agreed last June to set up a joint federal-state competence center at the BBK. In the event of a crisis, all actors involved in managing an acute crisis should come together there. In order to ensure better coordination, it is important that in such a case, where drinking water, rescue helicopters, rescue vehicles and helpers are required at different locations at the same time, “everyone sits at the same table,” emphasized Schuster.
If you are only discussing climate protection policy now, that is not enough. From his point of view, it is also important “that everyone considers an emergency with multiple problem situations to be a realistic scenario” for which Germany must prepare itself. Schuster, who took over the management of the office last autumn, said: “We must have a national strategy to strengthen resilience and prepare for crises.”
In the corona pandemic, Schuster criticized the fact that, due to the responsibility of the federal states for disaster control in peacetime, there was initially no nationwide overview of protective suits, masks and other relevant materials. The parties have different views on the question of whether the federal distribution of tasks should be changed in times of climate change and cyber attacks.
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