Invasions in Europe

Pavel Poc MEP, Czech Republic, S&D, Member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety

During my whole career, not only the political one,

I´ve been fighting invasions of any sort, however mainly the invasions of alien species, particularly the heracleum mantegazzianum. Paradoxically enough, although being a pragmatic social-democrat, when it comes to preservation of biodiversity, I am a real “conservative” – we need to preserve as much of it as possible for our own sake. In this pre-election period, there are two invasive topics worth mentioning.

I was the rapporteur for the regulation on invasive alien species in Europe. It is particularly in the interest of biodiversity to adopt this legislation as soon as possible – the Asian vespa velutina will not wait on our borders. Vespa velutina is not the only threatening invasive alien species, we´ve got plenty of them here in Europe – Arion lusitanicus known as Spanish slug, or zebra musselDreissena polymorpha, just to name those causing considerable economic damage. The aim of the directive is to set up the European framework for fighting and preventing the spread of those species, which are invasive, alien and harmful.

It may sound as a particular topic, but invasive alien species cost us 12 billion € per year. That, in my opinion, is not a “particular” or anyhow ignorable price tag. What is more important is that it is impossible to put any price tag on the harm being done by invasive alien species to biodiversity. Thus the European Parliament had to act quickly and yet effectively for creating such a framework, that would on one hand protect  biodiversity and at the same time would be implementable, realistic and effective. It was necessary to apply the pragmatic approach towards biodiversity protection, otherwise we would not achieve anything, as the Commission proposal disregarded some specifics of Member States. All in all the final text of the directive seems to be a success and a good news for everybody – both biodiversity and the ordinary people included.

The other invasion we are facing these days is the invasion (or offensive, if you will) of Europhobic populists across Europe. From the political point of view, this is even more concerning. The Europhobes not only want to stop any pragmatic progress that is necessary for further modernization of Europe, they actually constitute a sheer deconstructive force.

The biggest challenge of this years´ European elections thus comes from the “invasion” of Europhobes in the European Parliament. When the number of Europhobic parliamentarians rise, the support for environmentally friendly and progressive legislation will decline. This “Europhobic” invasion will be yet another threat to the protection of the environment, as it is expectable that these deconstructive forces will gladly revise many pieces of environmental legislation.

It is therefore of upmost importance, that people who care about pragmatic environmental protection will go to vote. Attendance at the elections is crucial. Europhobic invasion comes from rather extreme parts of the political spectrum whose support is strong, but numerically does not represent the majority of the European electorate by any chance. More people going to vote means a fairer and more representative result. And I believe, that this result will mean a victory for environment protection and protection of biodiversity. Let´s fight yet another invasion! We can win this fight together!

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