The Government includes permanent scientific advisors in the National Security System to face future pandemics, volcanoes or floods.

For the first time, a group of scientists will be part of the National Security System (SSN), responsible for Spain's national defense and security. The Government has created this group to integrate scientific knowledge into decision-making during emergencies and disasters in a structured manner, according to sources from the Presidency of the Government, following crises such as the COVID pandemic, the La Palma volcano, and the Valencia disaster.

The National Security System's Situation Committee has approved the creation of the Permanent Scientific Advisory Group on Crisis Management, which will be chaired by the head of the National Scientific Advisory Office (ONAC) of the Presidency of the Government, engineer and sociologist Josep Lobera . This team will be attached to the Situation Committee, a key SSN body for dealing with crises, currently headed by the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Parliamentary Relations, Félix Bolaños .

This is the first time since the arrival of democracy that the Government has included a permanent body of scientists and specialists in various fields in the National Security System, explain sources from the Presidency of the Government. This system encompasses the highest bodies responsible for security and defense matters, with a central collegiate body, the National Security Council , created in 2013 , and other specialized committees in different fields, such as aerospace security, cybersecurity, immigration, energy security, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, maritime security, and organized crime. Until now, the participation of scientific and technical advisors in these bodies was ad hoc and less formal. The new measure aims to establish a permanent and permanent structure for scientific advice in the context of serious crises.

The measure responds to the strategy of providing the SSN with tools that strengthen its capacity to anticipate, respond to, and recover from complex and cross-cutting crises. The backbone of this new group will be the 22 ministerial scientific advisors who were elected at the end of last year, although on a case-by-case basis, the group may include other specialists depending on the type of emergency being faced, the same sources explain. In its first year of work, the group of ministerial advisors has played a role in recent crises such as the massive blackout of April 28, when the National Security Council was urgently convened , or the potential impact of solar storms on electrical and satellite networks.

Among the main functions of this new group will be to identify scenarios with a strong scientific and technological component that could lead to situations of interest to national security, provide direct advice during crises at the request of the Situation Committee or the National Security Council, and subsequently evaluate the services provided.

The new body is inspired by the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, which has been in operation for over fifteen years. It has already supported the British government in recent crises where science played a central role, such as avian flu , the COVID pandemic , the evacuation of 6,500 people due to the risk of a dam failure, and the Ebola and Zika epidemics.

The agreement to create a new permanent group is part of the 2021 National Security Strategy , which promotes a crisis management model based on resilience and cooperation between administrations, the private sector, the scientific community, and civil society. It also responds to the strategic need to establish formal, permanent, and specialized mechanisms for scientific advice to the Government of Spain, one of the founding objectives of the ONAC, which has collaborated with the Department of National Security, headed by General Loreto Gutiérrez Hurtado , to develop this new instrument.

The ONAC was created in February 2024 to provide the Spanish Government with a scientific advisory system similar to the one that has been in operation for years in other countries. The organization launched with a budget of 10 million euros. One of its main tasks has been to select, in coordination with scientific societies, royal academies, and rectors of public universities, the 22 scientific advisors who work in each ministry. These advisors are 12 women and 10 men , all PhDs, with an average age of 47, who were selected from more than 1,600 candidates. Their job is to synthesize scientific consensus or dissent on any issue so that decision-makers consider science as a factor in addition to political, economic, legal, and budgetary aspects. One of the Government's main aspirations is for this new body to prove its usefulness and be maintained over time, regardless of the political affiliation of the current government.