Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-04-Speech-1-131"
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"en.20060904.20.1-131"2
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"Mr President, when an oil tanker sinks, we are all very well aware, firstly, of how serious a situation it is, of its environmental impact and of the need to respond in a joint fashion.
When we are facing fires or floods though, we in the European Union carry on acting as if each one were an isolated event that did not deserve or require a genuine global approach and, in some people’s view, as if they did not have a genuine European dimension. That is absurd. It is because of that lack of an overall view and of policies consistent with that overall view that we do not have a real range of instruments for combating them.
I believe that there are in fact three dimensions to this kind of disaster that must be tackled. The first is the emergency situation itself, and here the European Union can do much more than it is currently doing; the European Union could do much more to strengthen its measures for responding rapidly to civil protection crises, but it is not doing so; specifically, the European Union, in this case the Council, rejected or continues to reject the idea of implementing what was proposed to it in the Barnier report, with specific proposals on the creation of a European civil protection response service, and that is what needs to be set up for pure emergency situations.
Clearly, however, after the immediate coordinated response to the emergency, which does not work, because the planning instruments do not exist or have not been properly implemented, we naturally need subsequent assistance for those affected. That is the second element that we need to take into account. This is where my group agrees with the request from other groups, stressing the importance of mobilising the European Union’s Solidarity Fund, since that is what it was created for, with a political outlook – obeying its rules, of course, but with a political outlook.
A fire or a flood, and in this case I am referring specifically to the situation in Galicia, completely destroys the already scant resources that a region needs for its development. It is therefore obvious that we are facing a situation that requires the urgent application of the Solidarity Fund, in order to assist those populations and that territory which, in tourism and economic terms, have seen their source of income reduced to ashes – and in this case I mean that quite literally.
That brings us to the third dimension, in order to try to ensure that the first and the second are not repeated, although we can never prevent everything. I am talking, of course, about prevention. We need a genuine European forestry policy, which does not exist because it is still fragmented. Since Forest Focus was drawn up, there have been more fires covering larger areas. We hope that the European Commission will take this into account in the report that it has to produce before the end of 2006.
Biomass needs to be promoted. We truly have to take seriously the consequences of warming in this case and the rise in temperatures. The European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development must take account of the consequences for the forests.
In that way, the situation will change and we will no longer have to face problems such as this after the summer every year."@en1
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