Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-12-Speech-1-154"
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"en.20060612.20.1-154"2
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"Mr President, at this juncture I should like to express my special thanks to Commissioner Dimas and in particular to his staff and to the shadow rapporteur for their excellent cooperation in the drafting of this report.
The principle of solidarity is also important. This means that no Member State should take any action that harms any other Member State. The principle that the premier-league nations should always consult those in the lower division is extremely important, in my view.
I believe that floods are truly a major environmental issue; we need only turn on our television sets to realise that they are happening more and more frequently. From 1998 to 2004 we had more than a hundred cases of serious flooding, especially on the banks of the Rivers Danube and Elbe in 2002. These floods cost 700 lives, half a million people lost their homes, and the cost of the damage came to about 25 billion euros.
We had huge floods again last year, my home area being one of those directly affected, and so I believe that it makes good sense to consider at the European level what can be done to combat them. In particular, there is sound scientific evidence that the frequency and, more especially, the intensity of heavy rainfall have been increased by several factors connected with human activity.
I am thinking, for example, of headlong urbanisation, particularly in high-risk areas. There are urban developments in critical areas, we build streets there, we alter the course of rivers and, sad to say, we allow ill-conceived building projects in overflow areas on river banks. Then there is deforestation, which means among other things that forestry can no longer perform its protective function. Intensive agriculture, which can impair the porosity of upper soil layers, encroachment on riverside meadows and flood plains, building developments on pasture land, etc., all contribute to soil erosion and increase the risk of severe flooding. For these reasons I very much welcomed the Commission’s proposal to present its flood action programme following the floods of 2000.
Then came the Commission’s communication on flood management, and after that the Environment Ministers invited the Commission to present this proposal for a directive. Reference has already been made to the Water Framework Directive. Let me remind you that Article 1 of the framework directive proclaims the purpose of not only safeguarding and improving the aquatic environment but also of mitigating the effects of floods. I therefore believe that this initiative from the Commission is taking us in the right direction.
The European regulatory framework is absolutely essential, especially in view of the fact that water bodies and watercourses do not respect national borders, and not even the best of national strategies can guarantee success. Thankfully we do have Member States, such as Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, and Austria too, that have undoubtedly made a good deal of progress already. But their efforts are thwarted by the fact that most strategies are purely national in character.
If we do create this European regulatory framework, however, we must still place special emphasis on the subsidiarity principle. This is why I took particular care to address this issue again in my report. I explicitly mentioned it in several places because I believe that the Member States themselves are essentially responsible for determining the level of protection they intend to afford their citizens and that they should act independently, especially with regard to their choice of safeguards.
In this respect, I feel it is especially important that the report takes the level of regulatory detail into account, that we do not go too far into detailed regulation at the European level and above all that we remain aware of another danger connected with the committee procedure, namely that of prescribing to the Member States rules formulated in a way which makes them politically undesirable.
We should also take care to ensure that the Member States can implement the directive with the least possible administrative and technical input. Previous work should be protected; in other words, full account will be taken of the efforts Member States have already made to combat flooding. There is therefore no way in which parallel European rules can be used to compel Member States whose work on flood defences is already far advanced to implement a different set of measures, even though their own existing system already works perfectly. Associated with this is the need for close synchronisation with the Water Framework Directive, so that everything in the daughter directive lies within the scope of its parent directive."@en1
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