At the third plenary of the Conference on the Future of Europe two of our representatives, Clotilde Armand, Mayor of Bucharest and Cees Loggen, President of the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR) intervened on health and climate change.
Clotilde Armand, Mayor of Bucharest Sector One, said:
In our Working Group it was said that health is a common good, beyond the fact that it is also a fundamental right. The health of our children is the most valuable common good, and so we shouldn’t depend on the sole capacity of Member States to deliver – it should be a European responsibility. We often speak about the budget, who will pay and who will benefit from this. It is true that some Member States have to pay exaggerated contributions to the budget, but in Romania for example, many go abroad somewhere in the EU to work, and if we calculate how much Romanians paid for education and training and then go abroad, we see that through this exodus, Romania no longer has the capacity to treat serious conditions such as paediatric cancer. Europe does not have the responsibility for the health of our children and that should change
Cees Loggen, President of CPMR and a former member of our group, said:
It is great to see that many of the citizens’ recommendations are aligning with existing EU initiatives such as the COP26 or the European Green Deal. As president of CPMR, I want to draw attention to the topic of water. Climate change may at some point drive residents of low parts of Europe from their homes. It will accelerate migration by destroying several livelihoods. It may cause developments that could at some point lead to unavoidable consequences. Since prevention is better than a cure we must act now, we already have the techniques to manage water, but let’s add a multilevel governmental approach to it. Only in this way we can mitigate the climate crisis
Our delegation to the Conference of Europe consists of François Decoster, Mirja Vehkaperä, Paula Fernandez Viana, Clotilde Armand and Cees Loggen, part of the 30 local and regional delegates.
The third plenary of the Conference on the Future of Europe was held in Strasbourg on 21 and 22 January 2022, discussing 90 recommendations made by the European Citizen’s Panels on “European Democracy”, “values and rights, rule of law, security” and “Climate Change and Environment” and “Health”.
