Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-02-Speech-1-157-000"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20120702.20.1-157-000"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Madam President, honourable Members, I think I should start with something which many of you mentioned: water as a public good, water as a human right. I would like to be clear on the Commission’s position about this because we have just finished those discussions also in Rio.
On water efficiency, many of you mentioned leakages and I again agree with you: on the innovation side, for example, we have just published an FP7 call on water with a budget of EUR 40 million for the 2013 budget. We have just recently launched the Innovation Partnership on Water Efficiency, which will focus precisely on all those issues and, in particular, on questions which are connected to the leakages – I will mention it later on as it is very much connected also to new investments and where these could be found.
There were good points highlighting the possibility of financing in the future. In the new proposals that you will find on the table when you discuss the future MFF, you will, for the first time, find the possibility to finance green infrastructure – be it from the agricultural or the cohesion budget – which is something new and could be used also for good water protection.
Similarly, I was also stressing that water infrastructure, which is really one of the difficult and relatively heavy investments – we have to be honest about that – remains one of the possibilities for the cohesion policy in the future. It should be there, otherwise some countries which have the lowest level of development in the European Union simply have no serious chance to reach where we would all like them to be.
Concerning pollutants in water, we have two tools which we are using. One is REACH, another is priority substances. We have proposed adding 50 new chemicals to the list of priority substances controlled by the Water Framework Directive, including pharmaceuticals for the first time. Of course, this Commission proposal will be discussed on the basis of the opinion which will again be produced by Mr Seeber, the rapporteur, in September in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.
These are the issues which are important for us and we will also focus on them in the future. So you have a kind of institutional framework which is regularly looked at, where we have regular updates of those substances.
Cross-compliance has been mentioned. Cross-compliance is fundamentally an issue of prevention instead of cleaning up when the mess has been made. At this stage, we have not yet fully implemented the WFD, so it would be difficult to have all the rules on the table. But we have clearly envisaged, when the proposal for the common agricultural policy is in place, that cross-compliance should be part of the proposal. Of course I would agree with the honourable lady that simplification should be part of our logic and thinking when we design that proposal. I am absolutely in favour of that and you can count on that.
On shale gas – and this is the last comment which I would like to make – we are now in the process of the review of the EIA Directive and this issue will be considered also in that context. Shale gas exploration and exploitation beyond a certain threshold are already covered by Annex I in the EIA Directive and therefore, an EIA is compulsory for smaller activities subject to screening. We do believe in the Commission that the precautionary principle should apply and therefore, the EIA should be carried out also in those cases. We are also finalising some studies on shale gas, and on the basis of these we will decide whether guidance or additional measures are necessary in this context.
I have tried to answer all or the majority of your concerns. I would just like to say that the report is a really good basis for future work. We will be taking it seriously when we shape the final stages of the blueprint and I would like to thank again everyone who was involved in that good work.
There, we have just agreed to reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, to be progressively carried out for our populations with full respect for national sovereignty. The Commission was one of the most active supporters of this and of the two other related Millennium Development Goals on access to drinking water and sanitation, and this was reaffirmed in Rio. So I would like it to be clear what the Commission’s position is on this.
However, it should not be confused with the question of whether water should be free for all, because if we go that way, I can guarantee that we will not reach exactly the goal which we would all like to reach. So we have pricing of water as one of the tools in our Water Framework Directive, and when we are implementing the Water Framework Directive, we are also looking at that, so I think it is important that this distinction is made.
It is also important because we all understand that water today is one of the fundamental finite resources – and I stress ‘finite’. That is why we have also pushed so much for it to be included on the agenda in Rio as one of the goals and targets which we would like to see in the Rio document. So yes, we should fight for that globally and also at European Union level, and the blueprint should absolutely be one of the important parts of that fight.
If we continue with the use of water resources as we are currently doing, estimates are that we will have an approximate 40% shortage of water globally by 2030. So it is absolutely an issue which we need to address in a proper way.
It is truly a complex issue. As you all know, there is a quantity and quality side to the issue – quality, health, nature protection and so on – but in a way, we should understand that these are two sides of the same coin.
I think many of you also mentioned – and I agree – that implementation is truly the name of the game. Much has been achieved already due to the strict legislation which we have – I may mention, for example, the Bathing Directive, which has enormously improved the quality of bathing waters in Europe – also when it comes to the quality of inland waterways and other waters. I think there are many things which we can be proud of but there are also quite a lot of things where we have not yet achieved a lot, and, as Chris Davies rightly said, it is pretty much unlikely that, by 2015, we will reach good water quality status across the whole of the European Union.
What I can say is that you have my promise that I will look to the implementation: horizontally, but also when it comes to the specific issues connected to water. Now we also have data from river basin management plans which will improve our understanding and also our ability to act on certain aspects.
The second aspect of this complex issue which many of you underlined was integration. Integration is the true point of the prevention concept. If we disregard integration, then we can forget prevention, because prevention is, for me, the important thing, not going too far and then trying to manage the damage, because the damage is already done. So integration – in agriculture, in industry, wherever you like – is the real name of the game if we want to start to deal with those issues."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples