MONITORING THE FIGHT AGAINST EUTROPHICATION: THE ROLE OF THE BALTIC SEA PARLIAMENTARY CONFERENCE

Transcription

1 BALTIC SEA DAY St. Petersburg March 2008 Round Table Discussion MONITORING THE FIGHT AGAINST EUTROPHICATION: THE ROLE OF THE BALTIC SEA PARLIAMENTARY CONFERENCE Ms. Christina Gestrin MEP, Finland. Member of BSPC Standing Committee and Rapporteur on Eutrophication, Vice President of the Nordic Council Mr Chairman, Dear Participants and Friends, As we all know, the Baltic is not in the best of health. The sea that we share is often regarded as the most polluted in the world. As we also know, the problems besetting the sea have many causes. We have long been aware of the development that is going on. We have long had access to research results and studies describing what is happening and outlining what ought to be or could be done to arrest the negative development and perhaps even still manage to reverse it and save our sea for future generations. For many years now we have ourselves been able to see the result of eutrophication in the form of luxuriant algal blooms, increasingly turbid water and changes in both plant and fish populations in the Baltic. Despite all the knowledge and research results that we possess, the Baltic has continued to eutrophy and we have allowed this to continue without intervening with sufficiently effective measures. We have known for a long time that what is needed is a sharp reduction in the amounts of both nitrogen and phosphorus entering the sea, and we have known what the main sources of these nutrients are. Despite that and despite the fact that many measures have been taken primarily with respect to individual point sources, the trend has continued and eutrophication has accelerated. What we need now, as everyone knows, is no longer knowledge, but concrete measures. A lot has been done, but even more still remains to be done. We now need the courage and political will to act. The situation now is in one respect perhaps better than at any time since we became aware of the problems afflicting the Baltic. We now have a collectively approved plan, the Baltic Sea Action Plan, which is waiting to be implemented. We have a long list of concrete recommendations for measures, which together can arrest the negative development and save our sea. In the best case, we can as we have been able to hear not only arrest the development, but even reverse it, so that the conditions of the Baltic improves and eutrophication lessens. That presupposes joint inputs and contributions from all of the countries involved as well as from the European Union. Now we need political decisions and concrete measures. We parliamentarians have an important role and a major responsibility to oversee and monitor what governments are doing and what is being done in the context of their cooperation within the framework of the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) to implement the plan that has been collectively approved and follow the recommendations on combatting eutrophication that have been jointly and unanimously adopted by parliamentarians in our region.

2 2 Parliamentary cooperation within the framework of the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference (BSPC) has had the ecological status of the sea and environmental problems high on its agenda ever since the beginning of the 1990s. At our annual conferences we parliamentarians have teased out, besides matters belonging to other sectors of politics, questions connected with the environment and ecological status of the Baltic. In the final documents of our conferences we have drawn the attention of both the national governments and the Council of Baltic Sea States to these questions and called for concrete measures. At our conferences we have been able to familiarise ourselves with annual reports outlining what the CBSS has been doing in the area of environment policy, but there has been no actual direct reporting in relation to implementation and follow-up of our resolutions. The CBSS and the governments have no formal obligation to comply with the BSPC s resolutions. The BSPC is not a parliamentary assembly in the formal sense or in the sense of international law and has no direct mandate in relation to the governments. Our resolutions contain only recommendations to the governments and the CBSS, and as such impose no obligation that concrete measures be taken. That also limits our possibilities to practise effective parliamentary oversight of the governments actions. The mandate and instrument for our oversight of how the governments deal with the eutrophication question as well as for following-up our resolutions in other respects as well exist mainly in the form of our national parliaments which, after all, have a mandate in relation to their own governments and should therefore become more active in our parliamentary cooperation in relation to the Baltic. The Standing Committee of the BSPC, which directs cooperation in the periods between conferences, has now decided to make monitoring more effective. As a member of the Standing Committee, on which I represent the Nordic Council, I have been appointed a rapporteur with responsibility for monitoring both the BSPC s own recommendations on eutrophication and implementation of the Helcom Baltic Sea Action Plan. As you know, our own recommendations comprise the proposals that were presented by the BSPC s parliamentary eutrophication working group and adopted by the 16 th parliamentary Baltic conference in Berlin last year. The working group s efforts and its recommendations were already outlined here in St. Petersburg on Baltic Sea Day and I shall not go into their contents now; instead, I shall confine myself to the question of monitoring and my own role as a rapporteur. As regards the content, suffice it for me to say that it largely corresponds to the eutrophication-related recommendations in the Baltic Sea Action Plan. My duties as a rapporteur, which were originally supposed to cover only the resolutions from Berlin, have consequently been broadened to encompass also reports on implementation of the Baltic Sea Action Plan. The task was assigned to me in October and I shall present my first report at our next parliamentary conference, which will take place in Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland at the end of the summer. The way I have decided to do my work as a rapporteur is to follow what the governments in the CBSS member states, which are of course also members of Helcom, are doing to implement, on the one hand, the Baltic Sea Action Plan and, on the other, the Final Resolution from the Berlin conference. At the same time, I shall also be watching what the national parliaments that are represented in the BSPC are doing to, on the one hand, inform their own members and their environment committees of our recommendations and, on the other, keep track of their respective governments activities in this sector. Thus I have contacted the governments, or more precisely the representatives of the CBSS member states on the organisation s Committee of Senior Officials (CSO) and asked them to outline what measures they intend to take or perhaps have already taken to meet the recommendations in the Baltic Sea Action Plan, which were approved by all of the member states.

3 3 The questions that I asked the government representatives/members of the CBSS-CSO are as follows: Questions to the governments in the CBSS member states: 1. Has your government been given the Final Resolution containing the eutrophication recommendations from the 16 th Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference? 2. What measures will your government take in order to implement the recommendations on eutrophication of the Baltic made by the Parliamentarians in the Baltic Sea Area and what is the schedule for these measures? 3. How is your government proceeding with implementation of the Baltic Sea Action Plan adopted by the governments of the region at the Helcom ministerial meeting in Cracow last October? Do you already have a schedule for implementation or a national plan for improving the environmental state of the Baltic? According to the Baltic Sea Action Plan, all member states are supposed to draft national plans setting forth how they intend to achieve the reduction targets for nitrogen and phosphorus that have been set for them. The national plans are to be presented in However, the resolution from the Berlin conference calls for them to be ready already in In addition to the representatives of the national governments, I have also contacted the current holder of the CBSS Presidency, Latvia, and the CBSS Secretariat in Stockholm and asked them to contribute by giving me the information on measures against eutrophication that I need in order to be able to perform my task as a rapporteur. So as to be able to keep abreast of also what is happening within the national parliaments I first informed all of them of my task in a letter sent to their speakers and then asked some concrete questions of the national parliaments representatives on the BSPC s Standing Committee and Expanded Standing Committee, where all of the parliaments are represented. What I wanted to find out with my questions was how the BSPC s resolution has reached the national parliament and how it has been or will be dealt with and if it has been debated in the parliament and its environment committee. In addition, I shall try to find out whether and in what way the parliaments can and intend to monitor the measures that their respective government take to promote national implementation of the recommendations that are contained in both the Berlin document and the Baltic Sea Action Plan. The questions that the national parliaments are being asked through their representatives on the BSPC Standing Committee or Expanded Standing Committee are as follows: Questions to the national parliaments: 1. How and when has your parliament been informed about the eutrophication recommendations from the BSPC and how are you going to deal with the question in your parliament? 2. What measures will your parliament take in order to promote implementation of the recommendations on eutrophication included in the BSPC resolution? 3. Have you given the eutrophication recommendations to your government and are you going to keep track of what measures are taken to implement the recommendations?

4 4 My hope is that I shall receive replies to my questions from both the governments and the parliaments before the end of March. After that I plan to visit at least some of the countries to try, on the spot and through discussions with involved parties, to form a picture of how implementation is getting under way in practice. I hope that on these visits I shall be able to make use of my parliamentary colleagues from the Standing Committee and Expanded Standing Committee as contact persons in relation to both the parliaments and the governments. I am certain that this would make my task easier. As already mentioned, I have requested replies by the end of March. So far, none has arrived, but I am an optimist and fairly confident that some replies will arrive before the deadline. Also in the event that I do not receive replies from every country and even if a large number of replies fail to arrive, I am prepared to visit the countries in question and, irrespective of how many replies I receive, I shall present a report in Visby in the beginning of September. Included in the report will be details of which countries have replied and which have neglected to do so. Besides the parliamentary monitoring, i.e. the follow-up and reporting, that the BSPC will conduct through me, implementation of the Baltic Sea Action Plan will likewise be monitored by the government side of the CBSS. The close relations and exchanges of information between the BSPC and the CBSS will hopefully give the Standing Committee and myself the opportunity to share the information that the CBSS monitoring yields. The most concrete and effective monitoring of the Baltic Sea Action Plan will certainly be done by Helcom itself through its Implementation Group, which we have been able to hear about here and which is headed by my compatriot Ambassador Ole Norrback, who is also the coordinator for the Finnish Government s Baltic sea policy. I hope the group can contribute important information to help me in my task and I am looking forward to close cooperation with it and its chairperson. I hope at the same time that we from the parliamentary side will be able to provide the group and the implementation work with the political support that may be necessary. The Standing Committee of the BSPC will have its next meeting in Finland in May and both Helcom s Secretary General Ann-Christine Brusendorf and the chairperson of the Implementation Group Ole Norrback will be invited to report on the progress of the work and exchange ideas with the members of the committee. As regards keeping track of the work being done within Helcom, both the BSPC and I personally are being given excellent opportunities by being able to attend Helcom meetings as observers and having access to all of Helcom s information. In addition to my position as a rapporteur and the BSPC s contacts with both the CBSS and Helcom and the national parliaments, the BSPC s role in monitoring the fight against eutrophication of the Baltic can acquire a further dimension through cooperation with NGOs and civil society organisations in the various countries. I see it as, for example, an opportunity for myself in my capacity as rapporteur to make direct contact with environmental movements and nature conservation movements in order to, perhaps, complement or substitute for missing or inadequate information from parliaments and governments. I am certain that this cooperation can make a valuable contribution to my reporting work. If one takes care of monitoring as a totality, I believe that also NGOs will be active and can be of great importance. I shall conclude my contribution by saying that I am looking forward to my rapporteur task with great interest and am awaiting the replies to the questions I have asked the parliaments and governments with both interest and excitement. To enable me to complete my assignment I shall need all the help and cooperation that it is possible for me to get. I hope also that both in my report

5 5 to the Visby conference and in my final report, which I expect to present at the next conference after that in Denmark in 2009, I shall be able to tell of a positive development and active implementation in every country around the sea. Our beloved Baltic needs an active input from each and every one of us if it is to survive. Thank you for your attention.