Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-16-Speech-3-557"
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"Mr President, I would like to thank all who have spoken this evening. I will be travelling to Poland next week, and many of your comments give me a much deeper understanding of what I will be looking for.
Thirdly, there has been quite an important discussion on the Floods Directive. It is regrettable to say that some countries that are most severely hit by the floods have not transposed it yet. There are infringement procedures open, including against Poland, and I do hope that what has happened is a wake-up call so that we will see Member States moving very prudently on the implementation of the Floods Directive. Dates have been mentioned of 2011, 2013 and 2015, where very critical deadlines have to be met.
I have heard a number of speakers raise the issue of prevention, which is really much better than cure. In our communication, which will appear at the end of this year, we will be taking this comprehensive approach of combining prevention measures with response and feedback mechanisms through rehabilitation. Without this kind of approach, I think we will be sitting in this room in the future discussing the same issues the same way we are doing tonight.
That takes me to the much broader issue, namely adaptation to climate variability and climate change. Climate change is here to stay. Honourable Members have talked about mosquitoes returning. This sounds like an impossibility. Were they not supposed to be gone? Well, with climate change, we may see the return of malaria even to the European continent. Of course, the only way to cope is to very prudently assess what the trends are and what we can do to be best prepared for those trends. Climate systems are not linear. In other words, we have to be prepared for a wide variety of scenarios and this is what in my team we would like to bring forward so that our action can be as effective as possible.
Let me raise one more point, on insurance schemes. Regions of the world that have been at risk of climate variability for longer than us in Europe – especially Latin America and the Caribbean – have invented insurance schemes for risk mitigation that I believe are of interest to our region. As we think of advances in the financial industry in Europe, I think it is important to encourage innovation that would allow us to package risk better, reduce it and provide more assurances to those who suffer from disasters. Today, we are talking about floods. I would not be at all surprised if later in the summer, we were talking about forest fires. All those risks require us to think in a way that collectively reduces the burden of risk on those that are most exposed.
In the next months, I will certainly come to Parliament as we evolve our thinking on how we can best prepare and equip Europe to respond to disasters. I will be sure to come to Parliament often because what I have heard this evening – which incidentally relates to my country, Romania and Bulgaria are not entirely off the hook, with the Danube river being higher than it normally is at this time of the year – is a tremendous level of concern that has to translate into reciprocity of an equally high level of action.
May I just conclude, since many of the speakers have turned to you, Mr President, by congratulating you on your election, and say that I am very honoured to be the first Commissioner to stand in front of you in your new capacity.
Let me take first the issue that has been brought up most frequently by all speakers. This is the ability of the Commission not only to mobilise emergency assistance and deploy teams when we are fighting a disaster, but also to alleviate the pain and suffering of people, post-disaster, by providing access to the Solidarity Fund. I would like to make two points on this.
First, what do we have today? Many of the speakers have clearly been engaged and interested in how the Solidarity Fund operates, so let me just recap what people have said so far. There is a threshold of 0.6% of GDP or at least EUR 3 billion in damages. Just by way of illustration, for Poland this is a damages threshold of EUR 2.1 billion; for Hungary it is EUR 591 million; for the Slovak Republic, EUR 378 million. Only after that threshold has been passed is there access to the fund.
The submission has to be made 10 weeks after the disaster and then, on the basis of the submission, the Solidarity Fund is triggered. As many of you have probably noticed in the past, sometimes the response period – the time it takes for money to reach the beneficiaries – while intended to be shorter, can sometimes stretch into the future. So that is the reality today.
My second point is that the Commission has made a proposal to the Council which was also strongly supported – even before these very serious floods – by Parliament. The proposal aims precisely to increase flexibility, accelerate speed, and allow local circumstances to be better factored into the response.
However, this proposal has been stuck in the Council, mostly because of financial considerations in the context of the crisis. In the Commission, we are very hopeful that the floods will flush it through, and our intention is to take into account the experience of the floods and improve the proposal further. I would certainly be very grateful to Parliament for your support. We will echo the words we have heard this evening on what you would like to see by way of solidarity. So a friend in need can be a friend indeed.
We believe that is really essential and we are very much in favour of pursuing it. We will, given the circumstances and given the messages we have heard this evening, do everything possible within the current parameters of the Solidarity Fund to pursue the delivery of assistance as expeditiously as we can. The fund is not my area of responsibility but I will work with Commissioner Hahn who, like me, is very keen to see the fund being flexible and agile so that we can deliver now but also deliver better in the future.
Secondly, comments were made – in addition to the Solidarity Fund – on being able to tap into the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. Yes, indeed the EU financial instruments can cofinance a wide range of risk management measures. They can cofinance many of the things people talked about – such as reconstruction of river beds, afforestation, allowing a natural flow of water to return, planning, and multi-country studies.
Just as an illustration of what kind of funding is currently available: for Poland, EUR 700 million are available and for the Slovak Republic, EUR 120 million. Obviously, it is very important to look into current allocation and opportunities to use these funds in a flexible manner to provide relief to those who are affected."@en1
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