First PPRD South programme steering committee meeting

The Directors General of the National Civil Protection Authorities of the 27 EU Member States and the 14 Mediterranean and Balkan partner countries will meet for the first time in Brussels, on 23 October 2009, in a Steering Committee meeting within the 5 million EU-funded Euro-Mediterranean Programme on Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters (PPRD South).

The Meeting, which will gather also representatives of the European Commission and the UN agencies working with disaster management, will be opened by Marcus Cornaro, Director of the EuropeAid Cooperation Office of the European Commission and Guido Bertolaso, Head of the Italian Civil Protection Department.

The Steering Committee, which is the body in charge of endorsing the strategies of the PPRD South Programme, will discuss and approve the proposed PPRD South workplan. This includes a series of workshops on topics that strike most of the countries in the Mediterranean such as earthquakes, floods, drought, tsunamis, wild fires, sea pollution, industrial accidents, as well as a regional full scale exercise involving all the partner countries in the simulation of the response to a major catastrophe.

The meeting will provide an opportunity to the Civil Protection Directors General for networking, drawing on state of the art tools and methods of the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation on Civil Protection and preparing orientations for future regional collaboration initiatives on disaster prevention, preparedness and response.