Presentation
EUROWA: a European mutual assistance system for oiled wildlife emergencies
DescriptionIn an incident where thousands of marine animals may be affected by an oil spill, the effectiveness of an international oiled wildlife response operation may be crucial in the successful rescue and professional treatment of such animals, notably birds. Having immediate access to work forces of professionally trained responders can help in dealing with oiled animals arriving on the shore, while more trained and experienced resources are mobilised from further away or abroad, if needed. Rather than having to invest nationally into a preparedness level that can deal with large and complex spill scenarios, countries can collaborate so that they can blend their limited national resources to create an ad hoc multi-national system that can work on larger scales and tailored to the needs of an incident, including the more extreme and rare scenarios. This is the philosophy behind EUROWA, a regional European mutual assistance structure and capacity for wildlife emergencies that builds on Authority-NGO relationships.
EUROWA is based on mutual trust amongst its NGO members, who cooperate on joint international response and a collective process of creating tools, procedures, guidelines and training materials which improve the ability of the group to respond and to pass knowledge onto local responders. This cooperation, underpinned by the EUROWA Charter, provides a work force of trained and aligned responders, as well as an equipment stockpile, who can mobilise internationally for an emergency and work alongside local in-country responders educated to the same standards.
While the concept of mutual assistance was already applied for years by some pioneering organisations in the early years of the new millennium, EUROWA was born and has continued to develop via funding support from the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. The latest project developed a range of new educational tools for governments on oiled wildlife preparedness and response, has incorporated sea turtle expertise into the network and added new course modules to the EUROWA training portfolio. This paper will describe how EUROWA operates, outline its main objectives, its political lobby over the years, and explain how EU-funding has helped further the achievement of those objectives, so moving Europe forward in its collective preparedness for marine wildlife emergencies and encouraging national authority – NGO partnerships.
EUROWA is based on mutual trust amongst its NGO members, who cooperate on joint international response and a collective process of creating tools, procedures, guidelines and training materials which improve the ability of the group to respond and to pass knowledge onto local responders. This cooperation, underpinned by the EUROWA Charter, provides a work force of trained and aligned responders, as well as an equipment stockpile, who can mobilise internationally for an emergency and work alongside local in-country responders educated to the same standards.
While the concept of mutual assistance was already applied for years by some pioneering organisations in the early years of the new millennium, EUROWA was born and has continued to develop via funding support from the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. The latest project developed a range of new educational tools for governments on oiled wildlife preparedness and response, has incorporated sea turtle expertise into the network and added new course modules to the EUROWA training portfolio. This paper will describe how EUROWA operates, outline its main objectives, its political lobby over the years, and explain how EU-funding has helped further the achievement of those objectives, so moving Europe forward in its collective preparedness for marine wildlife emergencies and encouraging national authority – NGO partnerships.
Authors
General Manager
Marine Conservation Officer
Managing Director
Event Type
Paper
TimeThursday, May 16th8:00am - 8:20am CDT
Location278-280
Response