Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-09-Speech-1-240-000"
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"en.20110509.24.1-240-000"2
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"Madam President, at this very late hour, I would like to begin by thanking the rapporteur, Mr Arsenis, for his commitment and his work in preparing the report on forest protection and information.
Thanks also to the members of the committee who have put forward their views for their valuable contributions. The Commission announced its intention to present a Green Paper on forest protection and information in the context of the 2009 White Paper on adaptation to climate change. It was adopted in March 2010.
The Green Paper set out the various socio-economic and environmental functions of forests and the challenges they will face in coming decades. It also reviewed current forest information systems in Europe. Most importantly it invited Parliament and the Council, as well as all other interested stakeholders, to provide their views on forest protection and information and on the way forward so that the EU could provide added value to the work going on at Member State level and more widely across Europe. The guiding principle has been to respect Member States’ competences and subsidiarity while, at the same time, seeing how best the EU could contribute to ensuring that the functions of forests are protected and that the information necessary to achieve this is available.
The past year has been rich in discussion and the Council conclusions, together with the results of the stakeholder consultation, are already feeding into the Commission’s reflections on the next steps. Despite the fact that there has been a lengthy debate as to whether the EU needs a forestry policy or not, I am very pleased to see that appreciation of the economic, social and environmental functions of forests was a common theme in the stakeholder and Council input and that this concern is again evident today in the report drafted by Kriton Arsenis.
Likewise, there is a very great need for information at a comparable level across a wide range of forestry-related issues such as employment, stocks, biomass, fires, soil and forest carbon information and trends, forest health, biodiversity and water protection, and each institution lays great emphasis on finding means to achieve this.
In anticipation of Parliament’s report, we have already begun working with the Member States to develop further and more clearly the precise information needs at EU level. The report will help us to focus this work.
A further phase needs to be developed once the information needs are clear. We will be working on both aspects over the coming year, carefully and without duplicating other efforts in the forest area.
Armed with relevant useful and comparable information, we should, in the near future, be better able to provide EU added value across forestry-related socio-economic and environmental issues, thus paving the way for better EU input to help forests to continue to deliver their multiple benefits for us all. The Commission will now study this report in detail and reflect fully on our response to it and to the Council conclusions and stakeholders’ input."@en1
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