Monitoring the Fight Against Eutrophication

BALTIC SEA DAYSt. Petersburg 12-13 March 2008Round Table Discussion 12.03.2008MONITORING THE FIGHT AGAINST EUTROP HICATION: THE ROLE OF THE BALTICSEA PARLIAMENTARY CONFERENCEMs. Christina Gestrin MEP, Finland. Member of BSPC Standing Committee and Rapporteur onEutrophication, Vice President of the Nordic CouncilMr 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 themost polluted in the world. As we also know, the problems besetting the sea have many causes. Wehave long been aware of the development that is going on. We have long had access to researchresults and studies describing what is happening a nd outlining what ought to be or could be done toarrest the negative development and perhaps even still manage to reverse it and save our sea forfuture generations. For many years now we have ourselves been able to see the result ofeutrophication in the form of luxuriant algal bloo ms, increasingly turbid wa ter and changes in bothplant and fish populations in the Baltic. Despite all the knowledge and research results that wepossess, the Baltic has continued to eutrophy and we have allowed this to continue withoutintervening with sufficiently e ffective measures. We have known for a long time that what isneeded is a sharp reduction in the amounts of bot h nitrogen and phosphorus entering the sea, and wehave known what the main sources of these nutrients are. Despite that and despite the fact that manymeasures have been taken primarily with resp ect to individual point sources, the trend hascontinued and eutrophic ation 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 toact. The situation now is in one respect perhaps better than at a ny time since we became aware ofthe problems afflicting the Baltic. We now have a collectively approved pla n, the Baltic Sea ActionPlan, which is waiting to be implemented. We ha ve a long list of concrete recommendations formeasures, which together can arrest the negative de velopment and save our sea. In the best case, wecan – as we have been able to he ar – not only arrest the development, but even reverse it, so that theconditions of the Baltic improves and eutrophica tion lessens. That presupposes joint inputs andcontributions from all of the countries i nvolved as well as from the European Union.Now we need political decisions and concrete me asures. We parliamentarians have an importantrole and a major responsibility to oversee and monitor what gove rnments are doing and what isbeing 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 therecommendations on combatting eutr ophication that have been jointl y and unanimously adopted byparliamentarians in our region.2Parliamentary cooperation within the framewor k of the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference(BSPC) has had the ecological status of the sea and environmental problems high on its agenda eversince the beginning of the 1990s. At our annual conf erences we parliamentar ians have teased out,besides matters belonging to other sectors of politics, questions c onnected with the environment andecological status of the Baltic. In the final documents of our conferences we have drawn theattention of both the national governments and the Council of Baltic Sea Stat es to these questionsand 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, butthere has been no actual direct reporting in relation to implementation and follow-up of ourresolutions. The CBSS and the governments have no fo rmal obligation to comply with the BSPC’sresolutions. The BSPC is not a parliamentary asse mbly in the formal sense or in the sense ofinternational law and has no direct mandate in relation to the govern ments. Our resolutions containonly recommendations to the governments and the CBSS, and as such impose no obligation thatconcrete 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 thegovernments deal with the eutroph ication question as well as for following-up our resolutions inother respects as well exist mainly in the form of our national parliaments which, after all, have amandate in relation to their own governments a nd should therefore become more active in ourparliamentary cooperation in relation to the Baltic.The Standing Committee of the BSPC, which di rects cooperation in the periods betweenconferences, has now decided to make monitoring more effective. As a member of the StandingCommittee, on which I represent the Nordic Council, I have been appointed a rapporteur with responsibility for monitoring both the BSPC’s own recommen dations on eutrophication andimplementation of the Helcom Baltic Sea Acti on Plan. As you know, our own recommendationscomprise the proposals that were presented by th e BSPC’s parliamentary eutrophication workinggroup and adopted by the 16th parliamentary Baltic conference in Berlin last year. The workinggroup’s efforts and its recommendations were already outlined here in St. Petersburg on Baltic SeaDay and I shall not go into their contents now; in stead, I shall confine myse lf to the question ofmonitoring and my own role as a ra pporteur. As regards the content, suffice it for me to say that itlargely corresponds to the eutrophication-related recommendations in the Baltic Sea Action Plan.My duties as a rapporteur, which were originally supposed to c over only the resolutions fromBerlin, have consequently been broadened to encompass also reports on implementation of theBaltic Sea Action Plan. The task was assigned to me in October and I shall present my first report atour next parliamentary conferen ce, which will take place in Visby, on the Swedish island ofGotland at the end of the summer.The way I have decided to do my work as a rapp orteur is to follow what the governments in theCBSS member states, which are of course also me mbers of Helcom, are doing to implement, on theone hand, the Baltic Sea Action Pl an and, on the other, the Fina l Resolution from the Berlinconference. At the same time, I shall also be watching what the national parliaments that arerepresented in the BSPC are doing to, on the one hand, inform their own members and theirenvironment committees of our recommendations and, on the other, keep track of their respectivegovernments’ activities in this sector. Thus I have contacted the governments, or more precisely therepresentatives of the CBSS member states on th e 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 S ea Action Plan, which were approved by all of themember states.3The questions that I asked the government repr esentatives/members of the CBSS-CSO are asfollows:Questions to the governments in the CBSS member states:1. Has your government been given the Fina l Resolution containing the eutrophicationrecommendations from the 16th Baltic Sea Parliame ntary Conference?2. What measures will your government take in order to implement the recommendations oneutrophication of the Baltic made by the Parliame ntarians in the Baltic Sea Area and what isthe schedule for these measures?3. How is your government proceeding with impl ementation of the Baltic Sea Action Planadopted by the governments of the region at the Helcom ministerial meeting in Cracow lastOctober? Do you already have a schedule for implementation or a national plan forimproving the environmental state of the Baltic?According to the Baltic Sea Action Plan, all memb er states are supposed to draft national planssetting 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 pr esented in 2010. However, the resolution from theBerlin conference calls for them to be ready alr eady in 2009. In addition to the representatives ofthe national governments, I have also contacted th e current holder of the CBSS Presidency, Latvia,and the CBSS Secretariat in Stockholm and asked th em to contribute by giving me the informationon measures against eutrophication th at I need in order to be able to perform my task as arapporteur.So as to be able to keep abreast of also what is happening within the na tional parliaments I firstinformed all of them of my task in a letter se nt to their speakers and then asked some concretequestions of the national parliaments’ repres entatives on the BSPC’s Standing Committee andExpanded Standing Committee, where all of the parliaments are represented. What I wanted to find out with my questions was how the BSPC’s resolu tion has reached the national parliament and howit has been or will be dealt with and if it has b een debated in the parliament and its environmentcommittee. In addition, I shall try to find out whether and in what way the parliaments can and intend to monitor the measures that their re spective government take to promote nationalimplementation of the recommendations that are c ontained in both the Berlin document and theBaltic Sea Action Plan.The questions that the national parliaments are being asked through their representatives on theBSPC 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 eutrophicationrecommendations from the BSPC and how are you going to deal with the question in yourparliament?2. What measures will your parliament take in order to promote implementation of therecommendations on eutrophication in cluded in the BSPC resolution?3. Have you given the eutrophication recommenda tions to your government and are you goingto keep track of what measures are taken to implement the recommendations?4My hope is that I shall receive replies to my questions from both the governments and theparliaments 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 implementationis getting under way in practice.I hope that on these visits I shall be able to make use of my parliamentary colleagues from theStanding Committee and Expanded Standing Committee as contact persons in relation to both theparliaments and the governments. I am certain that this would make my task easier. As alreadymentioned, I have requested replies by the end of March. So far, none has arrived, but I am anoptimist and fairly confident that some replies will ar rive before the deadline. Also in the event thatI do not receive replies from every country and even if a large number of replies fail to arrive, I amprepared to visit the countries in question and, irrespective of how many re plies I receive, I shallpresent a report in Visby in the beginning of September. Included in the report will be details ofwhich 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 conductthrough me, implementation of the Baltic Sea Ac tion Plan will likewise be monitored by thegovernment side of the CBSS. The close relations and exchanges of information between the BSPCand the CBSS will hopefully give the Standing Comm ittee and myself the opportunity to share theinformation that the CBSS monitoring yields. The most concrete and effective monitoring of theBaltic Sea Action Plan will certa inly 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 AmbassadorOle Norrback, who is also the coordinator for th e Finnish Government’s Baltic sea policy. I hopethe group can contribute important information to he lp me in my task and I am looking forward toclose cooperation with it and its chairperson. I hope at the same time that we from the parliamentaryside will be able to provide the group and the implementation work with the political support thatmay be necessary. The Standing Committee of the B SPC will have its next meeting in Finland inMay and both Helcom’s Secretary General Ann-Christine Brusendor f and the chairperson of theImplementation Group Ole Norrback will be invited to report on the progress of the work andexchange ideas with the members of the committee. As regards keeping track of the work being done within Helcom, both the BSPC and I person ally are being given excellent opportunities bybeing able to attend Helcom meetings as obs ervers and having access to all of Helcom’sinformation.In addition to my position as a rapporteur and the BSPC’s contacts with both the CBSS and Helcomand the national parliaments, the BSPC’s role in monitoring the fi ght against eutrophication of theBaltic can acquire a further dimension thr ough cooperation with NGOs and civil societyorganisations in the various countries. I see it as , for example, an opportunity for myself in mycapacity as rapporteur to make direct contact with envir onmental movements and natureconservation movements in order to, perhaps, comp lement or substitute for missing or inadequateinformation from parliaments and governments. I am certain that this cooperation can make avaluable contribution to my repor ting work. If one takes care of monitoring as a totality, I believethat 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 andgovernments with both interest and excitement. To enable me to complete my assignment I shallneed all the help and cooperation th at it is possible for me to get. I hope also that both in my report5to the Visby conference and in my final report, wh ich I expect to present at the next conferenceafter that in Denmark in 2009, I shall be able to tell of a positive development and activeimplementation in every country around the sea. Our beloved Baltic needs an active input from eachand every one of us if it is to survive.Thank you for your attention.