Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-04-Speech-3-356"
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".
Madam President, Mrs Vassiliou, ladies and gentlemen, I would like us to reflect for a moment on the nature of this evening’s exercise. It seems to me that we do this often, too often. Each time there is a disaster, we meet here, in this Chamber, and begin our chorus of lament where naturally we say that what has happened is a tragedy, and we bow our heads in respect for the victims.
Of course, I do this along with everyone else, but I do not believe that our role ends there. Our role is perhaps, as my fellow Member was just saying, to plan for the future, since there will be other environmental disasters. We said this again this morning, with our vote on the Florenz report. We know that the climate is increasingly unsettled. Storms of the century now come each decade and soon will come each year. When there is no storm, there is flooding, and when there is no flooding, there are severe forest fires.
Faced with all this, what is Europe doing? I am well aware that the Council is incapable of contemplating anything beyond its national navel. The juxtaposition of 27 navels does not yet make for a great continental project. We suffer the consequences of this during every tragedy. We are told to ‘call for solidarity’, but using which funds? I remember in the Committee on Budgets, when we discussed funds, precisely for the climate, we were talking about a few tens of millions of euros. This storm alone has cost EUR 1.4 billion. How much will we have to pay in insurance bills before we realise that protection of the environment and the climate is not a burden, but an investment in the future?
Still today, we are continuing to discuss the need to mobilise European stakeholders when a tragedy strikes. But we already said that, as I recall, here in this Chamber following the AZF factory explosion in my city, in 2001. We said that we had to consider a European intervention force to show that in Europe, in the event of a human catastrophe, the word ‘solidarity’ is not just a meaningless concept, but that we take practical action. All these years later, what has become of this European intervention force?
I was actually at my home in Toulouse, ladies and gentlemen, when the storm struck. I now know what a major environmental disaster entails. If I needed to learn, I have now experienced it in the damage to my home, in the tiles that were ripped off and in the trees that were uprooted. Therefore, I now know what these populations have been through: people who, in just one night, have seen their life’s work completely destroyed.
However, as long as we, here in Parliament, and you, Mrs Vassiliou, members of the Commission, and also those absent this evening from the desperately empty Council benches, as long as we fail to realise that we must make real budgetary resources available to combat disasters, and not content ourselves with hollow words, as long as we fail to implement European solidarity through the actual establishment of a rapid-reaction, continental-scale civil intervention force, we shall continue here, tragedy after tragedy, to simply perform, once more, our chorus of lament.
The real response to storm Klaus may have come this morning, in our preparations for Copenhagen, and may come tomorrow, Mrs Vassiliou, by finally releasing funds and at last creating this civil force which is so lacking at European level."@en1
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