Untangling family bonds: natural disasters and EU emergency law

Abstract

Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity and complexity of natural disasters, understood as ‘calamitous events or series of events resulting in widespread loss of life, great human suffering and distress, mass displacement, or large-scale material or environmental damage, thereby seriously disrupting the functioning of society’. Yet, when measured against their growing humanitarian and economic relevance, legal scholarship’s attention to the body of EU rules and principles designed to prevent, mitigate, reduce and respond to natural disasters has been surprisingly scarce. Contributions examining the legal dimension of EU disaster response emerged largely in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, focusing on aspects of EU competence or on the toolbox of instruments available to the EU to respond to ‘crisis’,‘threats’ or ‘global emergencies’. These contributions form part of a growing body of scholarship on EU emergency law, broadly defined as ‘the rules of primary and secondary EU law that serve to address sudden threats to the core values and structures of the Union and its Member States’. Natural disasters, however, seldom feature in these studies. In a typology that contrasts sudden emergencies with structural crisis, natural disasters fall between the conceptual cracks by emblematically embodying a phenomenon that can no longer be conceptualised as exceptional, nor can it be seen as endemic to the EU. Based on this premise, this paper examines the legal-conceptual construction of EU competence with respect to natural disasters in EU primary and secondary law and in the case law of the Court of Justice to determine whether natural disasters can, or should, retain their family ties to EU emergency law. The paper argues in the negative, sustaining that natural disaster can no longer be understood as temporary, extra-ordinary or exceptional events, to which emergency powers should be relegated. Ultimately, the paper calls for a constitutional re-imagination of EU powers with respect to natural disasters, one that is not primarily grounded on State sovereignty and EU supporting powers, and for a narrow understanding of EU emergency law