Welcoming remarks at the First Meeting of the European Environment and Health Ministerial Board

4–5 May 2011, Paris, France

Madame State Secretary, excellencies, dear colleagues,

Let me start by warmly thanking the Government of France and the ministry of health for a very beautiful dinner last night and their wonderful hospitality and generosity here in Paris.

It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to this meeting on behalf of the WHO Regional Office for Europe. Thank you all for making yourself available to serve as members of the first European Environment and Health Ministerial Board.

The Member States and other stakeholders have given the European environment and health process a much higher political profile than in the previous two decades. By strengthening its governance mechanisms, they have sown the seeds of a renewed, more powerful and more integrated process in Europe.

We need your leadership and guidance, because this process needs to be successful in supporting national action, which is the foundation of making progress on environment and health in Europe and achieving the ambitious targets set in Parma, Italy. These targets call for greater accountability for making progress from all countries, and we have to work together to set up a strong and transparent system to monitor implementation and report on the results achieved across the WHO European Region.

Europe is looking for leadership, ownership and example setting by the countries that are leading the process. I expect your guidance to help the WHO Secretariat in identifying the priorities and in maintaining the focus of international action. This is particularly challenging for priorities defined at Parma, which aim at eliminating the big gaps in environment and health conditions still persisting between and within the countries of our Region. Problems with water and sanitation or air pollution, for example, will not go away by themselves, and perseverance is needed to complete the agenda.

In addition, we also need to react dynamically and effectively to emerging or unpredictable issues that require technical assistance, and the building of capacities and political consensus. As we may remember, since the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health in Parma, several environment and health emergencies in the Region have required prompt attention: the volcano eruption in Iceland, wildfires in the Russian Federation, floods in central and south-eastern Europe and a major chemical accident in Hungary. These are, are all examples of how much is needed to enhance and maintain the effective management of environment and health emergencies.

I am just back from the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. The recent catastrophe in Japan and the consequent radiation emergency resonated throughout the conference. It was a sobering reminder of the importance of complying with the highest standards of safety when dealing with nuclear power, to protect health of the people, through appropriate safety standards and effective preparedness for possible accidents, both in countries that possess and those that do not possess nuclear power. Witnessing the development of a debate about energy policies in many European countries, it seems to me that the environment and health process can play an important role in ensuring that people’s health and well-being remain central to any debate about energy policy options. This process, jointly owned by ministries of health and environment, can provide a proper platform to facilitate the exchange of views, experience and knowledge in this field.

I also see the importance of the European environment and health process in the context of the current development of the new European health policy, Health 2020, which will be submitted to the WHO Regional Committee for Europe for adoption at its sixty-second session in 2012. I see the European environment and health process as an innovative governance mechanism providing leadership in an important area of public health, and as the means to implement the environment and health agenda for Europe.

A preparatory conference for the 2011 United Nations summit on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) took place in Moscow, Russian Federation last week. The Parma Declaration makes an explicit link between environmental determinants and NCDs, and is a model for other regions across the world of concrete and strong actions that can be taken to effectively address NCDs through primary prevention. I see the European environment and health process, with its multisectoral breadth of engagement, as a living example of strategic foresight and “health in all policies” in action.

Finally, I hope that the process will make the health and well-being dimensions in environmental policies more prominent. I put a lot of hope in the partnership with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to build strong ties between the European environment and health process and the environment for Europe process, which will culminate in the Seventh “Environment for Europe” Ministerial Conference, scheduled to take place in Astana, Kazakhstan in September.

At this first meeting of the Board, we need to decide on its governance role, and its way forward to follow up the Parma Conference commitments. Addressing the organizational and sustainability aspects of the European environment and health process will be very important in making it all happen.

Let me close this welcome and introduction by highlighting in particular the last point of our dense agenda: at the Regional Committee session in Moscow last September, I noted that the success of the process will depend also on the capacity to mobilize the necessary resources to support the actions and activities that are expected of us, and anticipated that I would be raising this point in the appropriate forum. Later in the day, I will inform you of the recent developments in WHO to consolidate and strengthen our role in the process. I am here today to ask for your support and guidance to develop a strong and sustainable partnership and resource-mobilization strategy for the European environment and health process.

I thank you for your attention and wish us a most fruitful discussion.