The white paper was initiated due to the increasing challenges governments across Europe are facing when it comes to mastering crisis situations caused by natural catastrophes, manmade disasters or criminal and terroristic attacks. The question on how to alert the population in the affected area quickly, reliably and effectively has gained importance in the previous years. New methods of alarming the population are necessary, because of urbanisation and outdated technologies.

The European Union and several member states have started testing new methods. The most common methods use cell broadcast messages to mobile phones. This is an easy to implement method, which however has big issues because, according to a study of the UK government, only approx. 30 to 40%  of the persons reached read the messages directly. Another concern related to the testing of new methods is the lack of coordination between countries. The various methods are not compatible, which prevents messages from crossing borders.

Euralarm is urging the European Union and all national stakeholders to cooperate and share experiences, and is proposing that action is taken to integrate as many channels as possible, to integrate existing systems, including domestic systems connected to monitoring stations and to use standardisation methods to make cross-border systems compatible.