Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-21-Speech-3-432-000"
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"en.20121121.27.3-432-000"2
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"Mr President, as a rapporteur I have discovered huge resources in the results of the work of previous European generations in the same area and topic, namely CSDP and climate change. One is of the utmost necessity during times of a globally changing security environment and the other is around and happening every day. Hence we must live with that and cope with it.
That is why I believe our debate is very timely. It comes after Hurricane Sandy but, more importantly, it comes simultaneously with a non-paper by the Cyprus Presidency on the need to develop the military capacity of the EU, which aims to have a decision made by the Council during the year 2013.
We began the work on this report by convening a meeting of different stakeholders – with External Action Service staff, with the Commission DGs CLIMA, ECHO and DEVCO, EU military staff, the EDA and people from various other institutions. I learned a lot from those people. May I use the opportunity to thank them for their help and guidance.
Besides that, I pushed two other issues. Firstly, to appoint an EU climate security envoy within the External Action Service, following the British Government’s example – Admiral Neil Morisetti has been very successfully working for three years in this function. We also believe that this could support the German Government initiative to give an impulse to a similar function with the United Nations system. Secondly, another idea was to use the generally acknowledged perception that climate change is a threat multiplier and to use it as a platform to introduce more cooperation between Member States and the respective military in particular, up to forming a joint engineering corps for the European Union.
The shadow rapporteurs from all the political groups worked hard and many succeeded in convincing their political groups to support these ideas, whereas others disagreed and gave substantial reasons for their objections. We ended up with 17 compromises out of 150 amendments. I would like to thank all the shadows for their contributions, which made the report clearer and better, sometimes less ambitious but at the same time more pragmatic and closer to the democratic consensus which we cherish in this House.
Colleagues, thank you. I have learned a lot from you. To give just one example, Mr Van Orden asked me to be specific on the engineering corps and I was in some difficulty. Only later I discovered that this might have happened because I am only a former Soviet sergeant, but he has the experience of a brigadier. So we will have to cooperate on that in the future as we were able agree on his other concerns.
I wish to quickly highlight the three important points in this report where we achieved consensus. The Lisbon Treaty creates new provisions for implementing CSDP activities. That is why this report also describes tools which could be used, for example, in policy planning, with a coherent and logical approach to defence adapted to security challenges that we in Europe will have to face in decades to come. Also the mainstreaming of potential effects of climate on security into the most important strategies, policy documents and financial instruments, would be a success in my opinion. In the External Action Service it could also be done in the same way as the recently appointed Special Representative on Human Rights. That could also work with climate and security.
I would like to say a couple of words about duplication. We have been accused, regarding the role of the CSDP in climate-driven security threats, of duplicating the excellent work that has been done by Commissioner Georgieva and her people in the field of the Civil Protection Mechanism. We had a meeting with Commissioner Georgieva, who, as a former professor and author of many books on environmental economics, had no difficulty at all in seeing that this report is complementary to her achievements. I would like to thank her for her participation in making this report. I am excited that today’s debate is taking place and look forward to hearing every comment."@en1
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