The Official Journal of the European Union publisjed on Octobe4r 3rd, 2008, a Calls for Proposals under the Civil Protection Financial Instrument, to promote cooperation between Member States in the filed of Civil Protection cooperation to combat forest fires. The anual budget of this Call for year 2008 is 3.5 M€.

Events in recent years, in particular in summer 2007, have highlighted the scale of the risks in some Member States when major forest fires occur. In many cases, the Member States that have had to cope with such incidents have not been able to bring the situation under control until operational  assistance has arrived from other Member States.

The aim of the call, within the scope of the Civil Protection Financial Instrument,  is to improve mobilisation of additional operational resources and emergency support from Member States to assist other Member States to cope with forest fires too numerous and too intense to be handled by their own national logistical capacity and manpower.

Proposals should include activities such as:

• Establishing additional fire fighting resources (type of the fire fighting resources, contracting of additional flying hours that should cover as far as possible the period from 15 June to 15 September 2009).
• Decision-making processes.
• Deployment procedures (activities for sending the additional fire fighting resources with fire fighting aircraft to the site and the return trip).
• Integration of this resources into the national system of the coordinating beneficiary (test flights, if necessary, adaptation of national procedures, training, maintenance, etc.).
• Preparation of intervention scenarios, including an inventory of capacity which can be mobilised in an emergency situation and an operational manual for use of the resource.
• Lessons learned (reports, meetings, debriefings, evaluation of results, etc.).

Budget and Application's deadline

The indicative budget available for Commission financing of projects selected under the Call for Proposals to step up Cooperation between Member States on Combating Forest Fires amounts  to €3.5 million Euro. Projects should be implemented within a minimum of four months and a maximum of 18 months.

The maximum EC funding rate under this call for proposals is 80% of eligible costs per proposal  based on the project budget.

Each proposal must be sent in a single batch, either by post or by private courier service. Proposals  must be delivered to a single address:

EUROPEAN COMMISSION
DG Environment / Civil Protection Unit (ENV.A.3)
CALL FOR PROPOSALS “PILOT PROJECT TO STEP UP COOPERATION BETWEEN MEMBER  STATES ON COMBATING FOREST FIRES"
BU-9 2/170
B-1049 Brussels

Applications must be submitted to the Commission by 21 November 2008.

Further informations as well as relevamnt documents and the Gran Application Guide are available at the Environement Funding page of the European Commission.