Mr President, very little is as yet known about the submarine environment. That is why, moreover, it is hard to organise any sort of viable programme of protection. Stocks of some monitored, familiar species, that is to say mainly economically important species, have in many places diminished drastically. How can we protect species, therefore, about which we still do not even know anything? Protection is nevertheless the starting point for the EU marine strategy. Consequently, I too have proposed that we should grant sufficient appropriations to enable us to carry out an investigation and draw up an inventory of submarine species. The Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, HELCOM, has made more than 200 recommendations for improving the state of the Baltic. These are not binding on the Member States but the Commission might examine them and propose rules based on them that are. In the same way, EU investment is needed for the protection of nature in the northern seas. This would come about most effectively if the EU joined the Nordic countries, the United States of America, Canada and Russia as members of the Arctic Council. That would promote shared Euro-Atlantic understanding of environmental problems. There are environments in the European Union, such as many areas of the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, where the natural environment would not necessarily recover properly from a large-scale oil disaster. That is why we must have more talks with countries such as Russia to develop stricter common standards for merchant vessels. It is vital that oil tankers sailing in the sort of difficult icy conditions there were last winter are immune to risk. The Commission should propose an amendment, within the framework of UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which would allow intervention with regard to merchant vessels from third countries sailing through or close to EU waters if they are thought to be a potentially serious threat. In addition to oil disasters we should also consider, for example, the loud noise made by equipment used in mapping the location of natural resources to be a pollutant. I would furthermore like to draw the attention of the Commission, and the Council too for that matter, to the Member States’ unsatisfactory capacity for tackling oil spills. I myself looked into the situation recently when I sent out questionnaires to those authorities in the Baltic countries responsible for this matter. The replies made disappointing reading. The situation was best in Finland and Sweden, where the equipment they have would be sufficient in practice for clearing the oil coming from a broken fuel tank on a large passenger ship. If there were a major disaster the equipment in these countries would be insufficient even if it were used in combination. Around 40 million tonnes of oil a year already pass through the Gulf of Finland, for example, and it is supposed that this volume will have doubled in 10 year’s time. The Commission should initiate a survey of capacity for tackling oil spills and adopt rules for sufficient minimum capacity based on regional conditions and volumes of traffic.

Political group: PPE-DE