Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-06-Speech-1-034-000"
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"en.20110606.16.1-034-000"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, today we are debating, and tomorrow we will adopt, European legislation that, on first impression, seems rather unremarkable, but with this law on European environmental economic accounts, we are probably opening a new chapter in the measurement of progress and prosperity.
We have known for a long time that gross national product is inadequate. The purely quantitative view of economic activity says nothing about the environmental balance sheet, nor about the social balance sheet, and therefore it is high time that we measured whether, year on year, we are doing well or badly in terms of our measures and efforts.
We have monthly statistics relating to our labour market figures and we have annual statistics relating to our economic figures. We therefore know exactly what is happening in these areas. However, we have an incomplete patchwork of data on the environmental impact. This law on environmental economic accounts is intended to help us to draw up an accurate balance sheet in the 27 Member States and to establish whether we are making progress or, as is often the case, whether we are going backwards.
As long ago as 2002, Parliament called for reliable information to be collected on the state of the environment and the most important trends in, influences on, and causes of, environmental change, and for the public to be informed of these things. We want a scientifically sound concept for measuring the consumption of resources to enable appropriate political decisions to be taken.
We are pleased that the Commission took this legislative initiative in April 2010, but in our opinion, it was much too tentative in the way it went about it. We in Parliament and all of the groups have called for this to be done much more quickly, because the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations have already been discussing these matters for 15 years. This is taking far too long. We have therefore made considerable progress in the negotiations with the Council.
It was a very difficult situation in the Council, because some Member States do not produce an environmental balance sheet and we first need to create a foundation in all 27 Member States. The Commission proposed the inclusion of three modules. These modules are air emissions – in this regard, we are very well aware of which gases are emitted into the air. Then there is the financial expenditure arising from environmental taxes and environmental charges. Thirdly, there are the year-on-year national material flows, the input and output, measured in purely quantitative terms. This is a start, perhaps, but it is too simple a start, and Parliament has called for us also to produce water, energy and waste balance sheets and to find out about the status of our forests. These are the modules that we urgently want to see in the very near future.
There was disagreement about whether statistics can also be produced for the marine environment, in other words, statistics on the status of fish stocks. In this regard, our methodology is probably still in need of improvement. Thus, we have achieved improvements in this area. In two years’ time – by 2013 at the latest – the Commission is to present a report and, where possible, also propose a revision of this directive. I hope that, at the end of this decade, we will have a green national product in addition to the gross national product. That is our goal."@en1
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