‘Disastrous’ summer showed EU must step up climate action, says Metsola
BRUSSELS — This summer sparked a “realization” that the European Union needs to strengthen its climate-proofing efforts, including by tailoring its budget to the challenges of a warming world, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said.
She also expects the issue to feature heavily in Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech on Wednesday.
“There will definitely be… a reflection on climate,” Metsola said in an interview with several media outlets Tuesday. “Where we are, what kind of summer we have lived through. There’s always a little bit of this in every State of the Union… I think this year the accent will be higher.”
There is now a “sense of urgency and an understanding that we cannot let a winter pass before another summer comes” to prepare for the increase in heat waves, wildfires and floods, she added.
“It’s the timing of this, coming at the back end of a very disastrous summer,” she said. “And it’s a realization… if you look at what happened country by country, if you look at the drying up of our rivers, if you look at the fact that we aren’t equipped, that our houses are not equipped, that our vulnerable populations suffer more.”
Those discussions should also flow into the configuration of the Multiannual Financial Framework, the bloc’s long-term budget, Metsola argued.
“The second angle to that is, can we tailor-make the MFF for that? This is also linked to the long ask of this Parliament that we are more prepared,” she said, citing member countries’ increasing requests for financial support for dealing with climate disasters.
Metsola also said she expected von der Leyen to focus on the issues of competitiveness, affordability and security, including migration, in Wednesday’s speech.
The Parliament president didn’t ask for stronger efforts to slash planet-warming emissions. But she rejected the idea that competitiveness and climate action would necessarily clash.
“I think we made a mistake in the past of… treating the economy and the environment as though they were two completely different things,” she said. “We would be much smarter if we identified that each goes hand in hand.”
