Debate: EU climate risk assessment, taking urgent action to improve security and resilience in Europe
Date: TUESDAY, 12 MARCH 2024
Speaker: Wopke Hoekstra
Language: EN

There are four things I want to share with Parliament, Madam President, if I may. The first one is that I, of course, fully acknowledge that the debate is, and every debate is, almost by definition, not meant to be nuanced. And I’m also very much aware that it is campaign season. But I do feel compelled to once more state the obvious, and that is that we are facing a clear and present danger. It manifests itself every single year and certainly every single summer. Don’t take my word for it, but take the word of the citizens who experience the droughts, the floodings, every single year, and particularly every single summer again. Talk to them and listen what they require us to do. Secondly – and that is the bit of good news – there is something we can do about it. We need to do much more in the domain of mitigation, and clearly we need to bridge that with a just transition and with enabling competitiveness. We spent a lot of time also in the conversations we are having here on mitigation. But adaptation is, if you will, underappreciated, underdeveloped, and there is something we can do about it. It touches upon the concrete and the here and now, and I would hope that we will be able to unite on doing more on this particular part of the equation. Third – and I’m saying that to those who might have expected even more concreteness and even more actions in this plan – is this communication the end of it? Is it the beginning of the end? No, clearly it isn’t. It is at best the end of the beginning on our quest against adaptation. It is a direction of travel. It is not an implementation plan. What we do do is we highlight what we feel is necessary in terms of the governance, in terms of the tools, in terms of the policies and in terms of financing. I feel that at this stage, given where we stand, this is absolutely the right way forward. Will we be back? Absolutely. And I would be the first to advocate that there should be paid more attention by the next Commission also to the domain of adaptation. Fourth, and finally, let me get to one specific point that Catherine Chabaud – who, by the way, I admire from all she did in her previous walks of life – which she asked. Because she basically said, okay, out of all these things that are in here, what would you, what would I, what would the Commission think is most effective, most actionable? I think the fair answer to it, and the first part of my answer, would be that in order to really judge that I would want to have the dialogue with the Member States, because in the end they are the best judges of what they can most easily copy, implement and use together. But if I were now to articulate what the Union could do, I would probably go for the fourth pillar, which is mainstreaming the financing we do through the RRF, through cohesion money, and through all the money we are going to spend, and make sure that every single euro we’re going to spend in the future is actually climate-proof. If that is something we would do, it would matter a lot in terms of resilience going forward.