Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-12-Speech-2-046"
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"en.20061212.9.2-046"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, Members of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, the environment is a broad field; all human life on our continent is dependent on both air and water, and groundwater is among the most important and most vulnerable resources that we humans possess. It recovers lost quantity only very slowly, and regains its original state only very slowly after pollution; cleaning polluted groundwater can be done, if at all, only at enormous expense and with recourse to enormous technical resources.
Our experience with air is currently teaching us that all the measures we have taken over the past decade have proved insufficient to prevent climate change and all its deleterious side-effects. Where air is concerned, we in Europe can accomplish relatively little unless other industrial states around the world lend a hand. Where groundwater is concerned, here in Europe, we alone have the power to secure this precious good for future generations, and in that the precautions we take and the protection of the groundwater ecosystem are of the utmost importance.
This has been my core concern, the thing for which I, as rapporteur, have fought, and I am grateful to all those who have supported me in this, by which I mean primarily you, the Members of this House, for, without your convincing votes at first and second reading, we would not have been able to achieve the result that we did in the conciliation negotiations with the Council, even though we had the Commission’s support. I would like to thank the Council and the representatives of the Commission for their constructive cooperation and for their support in the quest for compromises.
What, then, have we achieved? The protection of the groundwater ecosystem and the precautionary approach have been explicitly included, the latter of which meaning, with regard to groundwater, that water that is still clean must be kept in good or very good condition. It means not leaving action until the conditions defined by the limit and threshold values as ‘poor’ have already come about. The reversal of trends and deterioration are regulated in such a way that not only the transition from good to poor conditions, but also ongoing increases in values within a category are considered and have to trigger action. When laying down the threshold values for the materials described in part B of Annex 2, the Member States shall be required to take account of knowledge concerning toxicity to humans and the environment as well as of hydrological conditions, in other words, of background levels, in order to be able to take better account of the differing conditions from one European region to another.
For the purpose of reviewing the effectiveness of these measures, the introduction of a review clause was especially important. The observation on the Nitrate Directive in Annex 1 was deleted and the reference to it in Annex 4 has been expanded. The targets for protection and repair laid down by the Nitrate Directive and the Water Framework Directive in conjunction with this Groundwater Directive, which is derived from them, are comparatively stringent, and the new Article 11, on evaluation, is important in this regard. The Commission’s reports on groundwater must include an assessment of this directive in its relation to other relevant environmental legislation – such as the Nitrate Directive – and of the degree to which it is in harmony with it. The wording of the directive has now been made clearer and less ambiguous, with concepts such as ‘background concentration’, ‘starting point’, or ‘significant upward trend’ being defined, and requirements that are unclear or open to reinterpretation being deleted. Where its implementation is concerned, the Member States are allowed more scope for devising their own solutions, with the possibility left open of contractual agreements between, for example, farmers, water treatment companies, and local authorities, and, when the directive is adapted in future, this House will be allowed more scope for its own input, since the new comitology procedure enables it to raise objections when the lists of pollutants, indicators and limit values are altered, and its consent is required before specific substances can be deleted from the list.
The rural development regulation makes it possible for agriculturalists to be compensated for losses of income sustained by them in consequence of constraints imposed on their management of their land in order to protect groundwater. We sought compromises, and we have managed to find them. I am firmly convinced that we will be able to sustain and defend all this. There are some irregularities remaining in the various language versions, and I ask the language service to iron them out. The new groundwater directive will be an effective aid in protecting our groundwater, and so I ask all of you to vote to accept that which has emerged from the Conciliation Committee."@en1
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