mr president like mr tatarella i would like to begin by thanking the people closely involved with helping us reach first-reading agreement today on the emas report
i would like to thank the shadows who are here today the commission who have been very helpful in getting agreement and to the czech presidency who are not here to hear my thanks
thanks also go to the staff in parliament and the groups and to my own assistant elizabeth who played a big role in making sure we were here today
it all went very fast from the time we started discussing it to today so we now have agreement before the election
emas is a voluntary scheme which provides a framework to assist businesses and organisations to improve their environmental performance
it started fourteen years ago and has had some modest success with about four zero participants which if you think about it is not such a huge number in the overall european union
the commission set a target of increasing that to thirty-five zero participants
that is a very ambitious target
it is almost a ten fold increase
i think it is right that we should try and improve the take-up of emas because otherwise its impact is going to remain limited
but if we are to increase the impact we also have to retain the environmental integrity of the programme
i think the agreement we reached today does achieve that balance between hopefully making it more attractive to people while at the same time retaining the environmental integrity
we have made some changes which we have agreed with the commission and i think they are important
firstly corporate registration so that a company or organisation with more than one site can actually register once in one country which is very important
this parliament had to register three times in luxembourg france and belgium in order to get emas
from what i hear from the staff it was not an easy thing to do
so that kind of change is important
also cluster registration for organisations involved in the same sector reduced fees and lighter reporting requirements for smes i think emas is a bit too burdensome for small organisations so it does need to change and better alignment with iso fourteen thousand and one
particularly important to me is the introduction of sectoral support documents
i think the commission is going to work very hard at this and this will help organisations to benchmark themselves against similar organisations
core indicators will also be introduced
these are very important to improve the programme and help people on the outside look at organisations and see how they are doing
i do hope these will encourage people to take part in emas not because i want to play a numbers game and see emas competing with iso but because i think the scheme is a good one and could help us to meet our sustainability criteria
today the eyes of the world are very much on london where world leaders are gathered to talk about the financial downturn and the global banking crisis
there will be some no doubt who are wondering why we are sitting here talking about environmental auditing at a time when organisations and companies are feeling the financial strain
they will see this kind of initiative by the commission as a distraction
but i think that is wrong
for me and my socialist colleagues the green agenda is very much part of the solution to emerging from the financial crisis that we are in
we need to invest in energy and renewables and we need to be cutting our environmental footprint
although emas is a very modest programme in the big scheme about climate change which the commissioner has worked so hard on i think it nevertheless plays a role in helping the european union and the rest of the world to cut our environmental footprint
