Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-18-Speech-4-155"
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"en.20031218.5.4-155"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, my fellow Member has just said that she really does not want us in future to have to add our tears to the waters that regularly devastate our regions. Unfortunately, I am much less optimistic than she is. Much less optimistic because I know very well that you were making a wish, Mrs Grossetête. However, wishes are not enough when we see the climate change that is taking place on our planet. I was in my region of Languedoc a few days ago and people told me that what we are seeing now did not used to happen once in a hundred years. We have now seen it three times in two years. It is therefore clear to see that there is a change of frequency, magnitude and scale.
I am always surprised to see the authorities, not just in my country, that would be too easy, but in all the countries affected, running a little bit behind the disaster. This summer, in the regions that were affected in south eastern France, the locals were already piling up sandbags. How was it that the local people knew, but the authorities did not act until disaster happened? There is clearly a gap between those who are on the ground and suffer the destruction and the decision makers, who are obviously still far away from it.
With heat waves, storms and sudden floods, the climate is changing. I do not have the impression that public policies are changing at the same rate. I think a whole arsenal of measures need to be taken to deal with it, taxation in particular. How many times have we, the Greens and regionalists, said in this House that the tax weapon really should be used to change behaviour that poses a threat to the climate? And we are still waiting for that tax on pollution, that tax on discharges that change the atmosphere of our planet and which, in the end, are destroying entire regions.
Aids are in the process of changing. I do understand, Commissioner, that we have indeed little by little, disaster after disaster, deployed finance for repairs and prevention. Repairs are good, prevention is better, my fellow Members have said. However, and I agree with them entirely on this point, prevention is inconceivable without a far-reaching reform of the Structural Funds. So long as there is zoning it will be ineffective. You must understand that storms and floods often care nothing for the zones we have so cleverly drawn on a map far away in Brussels or elsewhere. So these funds definitely need to be reformed and perhaps all those Structural Funds that do not find any use on the ground but are paid back into Community and then national budgets could be better employed in prevention to meet this climate change.
In conclusion, I was saying that these problems have obviously changed in frequency and scale. Even if European public policies are changing, which I note and welcome, I do not have the impression that they are changing at the same speed and to the same extent, and I regret that."@en1
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