Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-255"
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"en.20001025.11.3-255"2
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"Commissioner, allow me to focus for a moment, in the context of Mr Da Silva's excellent report and the situation which she has just described, which is important and full of potential for the future, on a phenomenon which is assuming dramatic proportions: the floods which affected huge areas of Europe last week, primarily northern Italy but also France and Spain. We are acquiring the habit of describing our times in dramatic language: verbs such as to overflow, to flood, to burst banks, are part of a vocabulary which is becoming almost the norm. We feel that this is a dramatic consequence of the climate change taking place and that the social and economic system must provide some sort of response to this.
Even the climate experts tell us that the very meteorology of our regions is changing. The exceptional amount of rain which has fallen over the last few days has served to offset the prevailing drought of the past year. We are told that the drought trend will continue into the years to come and worsen as time goes by, unavoidably interspersed
with the odd deluge and resulting floods. And so, now that, sadly, our dead have been buried, the journalists have left the devastated areas and the river, in this case the Po – I live by the Po – is again taking its normal course, it is time, as we say in Italy, to put up our umbrellas, not to appear prophets of doom but to evaluate once again the requirements and the remedies.
Certainly, a great deal of progress had been made in recent years in the area of alert and alarm measures, which have made it possible to keep the scale of the disasters in check, but although this is important, it cannot be considered a primary factor. We need a defence policy dedicated purely to following up the recommendations of the experts. We need to be making political and regional planning decisions that protect the earth even when the sun is shining.
I would therefore stress a few points. The first concerns the approach to man's built environment, which must not be overlooked. Construction must be oriented towards ever more stringent application of planning rules, standards and controls. In particular, there must be greater emphasis on man's agricultural environment. In the recent flooding of the Po, farmland acted as a floodway, protecting the urban centres, and agriculture channelled off the floodwater, bearing the brunt of it itself in order to protect built-up areas. Therefore, we must reaffirm the role of agriculture as the protector of the environment, a role which is wont to be sidelined, overlooked and undervalued on sunny days. There is no provision in agricultural or environmental policy or in town and country planning for this role played by agriculture. Europe needs to pinpoint appropriate forms of coordination in this regard."@en1
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