Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-05-Speech-4-013-000"
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"Mr President, honourable Members, I may be a bit longer than normal, but Rio was not short either. I would like to start by thanking the Members of the Parliament who, despite many difficulties, decided to join the conference in their personal capacity. I appreciate the exchanges we had during the conference and I am pleased that you can now share your impressions of the complex negotiations with other honourable Members too.
This leads us to the means of implementation, and that is also why the European Union has taken the position that first and foremost, each country must take the necessary measures to put in place an enabling environment of domestic policies that is designed to be self-sustaining.
Secondly, progress towards sustainable development entails providing the right financial instruments. We repeated our commitment to official development assistance, but order alone is not the answer. Public and private funding and business expertise should go hand in hand in establishing appropriate financing strategies. Innovative sources of financing should be encouraged and emerging economies should take a stronger role proportionate to their evolving international status.
Thirdly, moving towards more sustainable development also depends on skills, know-how and technology diffusion. In this regard, the European Union research framework programmes are open to all countries, including support for researchers in developing countries. The green economy can also make a real difference in the development and diffusion of green technologies to the countries having most natural resources.
On the goals, targets and SDGs
he European Union has made efforts to make the text more operational, including by proposing goals and targets with timelines in several areas, as you know. We have not obtained the timelines we sought, with exceptions such as the commitment to achieve sustainable reduction of marine litter by 2025, but the EU has achieved the integration of most of its proposed targets into the main text in the form of express commitments, for example, on future action concerning extending the protection of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
This has reinforced the text to make it more action-orientated. These efforts of the European Union to focus attention on key issues such as sustainable energy, water, oceans, land and biodiversity, food security and resource efficiency, should also bear fruit in the next month in the process to develop sustainable development goals or SDGs.
The decision at Rio to develop SDGs and make them operational is indeed one of the main outcomes of Rio+20. For the EU, the work on SDGs should be coordinated and coherent with the review process of the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, without deviating from efforts towards their achievement by 2015. It would be important to have an overarching framework for post-2015 that encompasses the three dimensions of sustainable development with goals that address key challenges in a holistic and coherent way.
In addition, the agreement to launch the SDG process also means bringing a fresh impetus to a concept that was shown to be at risk at Rio. I refer to sustainable development taken as a holistic notion. Indeed, at Rio+20, in spite of initial difficulties, we have reaffirmed the need to put together our efforts to eradicate poverty and to secure sustainability within our planetary limits. In retrospect, reaffirming the holistic vision was more important than we initially thought in view of the resistance from many sides to continuing to address these two matters in conjunction.
On the institutional framework, overall, we welcome the agreement to reinforce the institutional framework for sustainable development. Rio has reinforced international environmental governance by strengthening and upgrading UNEP. It will now have universal membership and must become our common home to set the global environmental agenda. In this new set-up, a truly global UNEP will have a new authority that will allow it to take actions that were, until now, beyond its reach. We have already started the strategic reflection on this new potential strength. We will, however, continue to work together with our partners towards the creation of a fully-fledged United Nations environmental organisation to allow it to function on an equal footing with other UN organisations.
The other institutional reform is the decision to establish a new high-level political forum on sustainable development which will replace the Commission on Sustainable Development. It should allow the regular participation of Heads of State in reviewing the progress of all our commitments. The EU has ensured that it will have most of the functions required and it will be important to make sure that this reform brings real change.
To conclude, at Rio we reaffirmed that we share the same planet and that we share the same common responsibility towards future generations. None of the countries and regions present at Rio achieved in full what was wanted initially. This also applies to the European Union, but we have worked together with all the other countries to develop common ground, and it is a fact that the document would be less ambitious and less concrete without hard work and also commitment from many who worked on the side of the European Union.
I want to recognise up front that the Rio+20 outcomes document is less ambitious than what the European Union had planned and wanted. However, after long negotiations, the European Union and its Member States decided to support its adoption as a step in the right direction. There are a number of areas where the European Union would have hoped for a more ambitious outcome. This applies, for instance, to setting concrete timelines for the specific commitments in the priority areas, or to institutional aspects.
Rio+20 has not gone as far as most Europeans would have wanted, but the key message today is that we agreed on many useful elements, many more than first reactions would lead us to believe, and this is why we should now focus on implementing them and building on them. The fate of the question of whether Rio+20 was a failure or a success is actually still in our hands. It will depend on what we do with it from this point in time in implementing it in full.
The European Commission intends to do the necessary to build on what has been agreed at the highest level. We are looking forward to the European Parliament’s view on how this can be best done, and count on you to keep the ambition and positive energy generated in the run-up to Rio alive in the years to come at international, national and also local levels.
The global transition to a sustainable model of development is obviously far from easy, and that was what Rio was actually all about. It demands courage, vision, coherence, trust-building, but also time, which we do not have in abundant quantities, due to the urgency of the challenges we are facing, but that transition is simply inevitable. So, instead of repeating what Rio did not deliver, let us rather join forces, find friends, find partners who share our analysis and also our determination, and start to deliver many of the ideas mentioned in the Rio document, in Europe and also globally. Nobody is actually preventing us from doing so, and time is running on.
On the other hand, however, the final outcome still remains close to a range of initial objectives of the EU and, more importantly, it provides a basis for further work in the right direction if properly implemented. But this must be done with a sense of urgency, because the planet and the poorest in the world cannot afford any delays. This is why we decided that it is better to have this agreement than no agreement at all. As you know, the challenges are global as are, in many cases, the solutions and we need to continue working with our partners also in the future.
The outcome document acknowledges the important role of an inclusive green economy in achieving sustainable development and poverty eradication. It is recognised as an important tool for achieving sustainable development for all countries. It will enhance our ability to manage natural resources sustainably, increase resource efficiency and reduce waste. It relates to changing the way we consume and produce today to adapt our economies to the boundaries of our planet and to allow future generations to meet their own needs. Overall support for this was confirmed by a number of countries during months of preparations and by positive references to the green economy in the final statements made by most Heads of State, including Heads of State from the majority of the developing countries.
The document also recognises the need for broader measures of progress to complement GDP in order to have more solid policy decisions, as well as the importance of corporate sustainable reporting. The outcome document provides the necessary basis to turn these words into actions at various levels. At a time when our society suffers widespread unemployment, we are also satisfied that Rio+20 was given a stronger social angle to sustainable development on matters such as decent work, green jobs and social protection floors, thereby enhancing the linkages between its three dimensions.
We also contributed actively to highlighting that democracy, human rights, the rule of law, good governance and gender equality and empowerment of women are indispensable to achieve sustainable development. These are the European values we will never back off from. The fact that these concepts have been made more operational at Rio, for instance, in relation to the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, is important progress.
Concerning civil society and the private sector, the European Union has fought for and secured a good outcome in relation to the fundamental role of civil society and stakeholders in the realisation of sustainable development. We will keep working throughout the next reforms to increase their participation in the decision-making process. In the new UNEP, for instance, we have agreed to ensure the active participation of all relevant stakeholders and to explore new mechanisms to promote transparency and the effective engagement of civil society.
I would also like to highlight that Rio Principle 10 on access to information, public participation in decision making and access to justice has been extended at Rio+20 from environmental matters to sustainable development as a whole. The inclusive green economy can bring fundamental changes to progress towards sustainable development because it will change the economic fabric. We have seen enormous engagement by the private sector in Rio. This gives me hope that the top-down endorsement, even if weaker than we wanted, and the strong bottom-up movement, will actually bring about change faster than we could have hoped for.
The private sector, if given the direction and framework ensuring public goods, can create investment, prosperity and well-being, decent employment and green jobs and help to promote sharing of know-how and development and diffusion of innovative technology. This will be fundamental to the necessary mobilisation of all means of implementation from all sources. This is the key to moving away from focus on the official development assistance approach alone."@en1
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