BSPC President Jānis Vucāns has addressed the particpants of the 7th Barents Parliamentary Conference in Helsinki, Finland on 29 September 2015. The BSPC President spoke to the parliamentarians and invited guests in a session on “Environmental issues including climate change – Today and future cooperation in the environmental sector”.
In his speech Mr Vucāns underlined the necessity of cooperation at parliamentary level and especially in the field of climate change:
“The Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference has again highlighted in its annual conference four weeks ago the utmost importance of intense cooperation and good, peaceful neighbourliness. This includes the necessity of strengthening the cooperation in the Northern Dimension, for a stable foundation of relations and cooperation between each and every regional organisation and format. In the current period of time, cooperation at parliamentary level has intrinsic value because such cooperation involves the elected representatives of the citizens of the participating countries. The Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference has placed a special emphasis on environmental issues in many conferences. Our generation has a special responsibility to prevent a disastrous development of the ongoing climate change. Since 30 years the climate change is one of the fundamental political challenges in the world.”
He underlined that climate change is a permanent issue for the BSPC since several years among others in the framework of its Working Groups on Energy and Climate Change as well as on Green Growth and Energy Efficiency. The BSPC President stressed the importance of a binding climate agreement for all states parties at the World Climate Conference in Paris at the end of this year. With a view to the regional level he equally called for an intensive cooperation and political exchange, among others between the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the Helsinki Commission and the BSPC. Mr Vucāns expressed the BSPC’s explicit support for the CBSS project BALTIC 21, which tackles the issue of climate change. With regard to the Barents Parliamentary Conference he pointed out: “In my opinion it is important and helpful for progress in several environmental fields if we – the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference and the Barents Parliamentary Conference – bundle our common interests on environmental issues.”