Pere Joan Pons addresses the meeting in Marseille, 15 June 2023MARSEILLE, 15 June 2023 – Addressing the 20th Meeting of the Mediterranean Commission on Sustainable Development (MCSD) in Marseille today, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Vice-President Pere Joan Pons (Spain) said that parliamentarians play a pivotal role in advancing sustainable development goals and addressing environmental challenges. Members of Parliament, he underlined, have the powers to shape national legislation, allocate resources, and hold governments accountable for their commitments.
“By integrating sustainability principles into our legislative agendas and fostering public awareness, we can drive transformative change,” Pons said. He added that the OSCE PA has been at the forefront of promoting sustainable development and environmental protection, noting that during the COVID-19 pandemic, OSCE parliamentarians consistently advocated the need to swiftly address the multifaceted impact of environmental degradation, climate change and loss of biodiversity on both the people and planet’s health.
“To that end, we have organized numerous initiatives, including conferences and public calls, to facilitate knowledge sharing and promote concerted actions among policy-makers,” Pons said.
Pons noted that the OSCE PA’s efforts cover a variety of interlinked issues, such as energy security, environmental degradation and pollution, climate change, public health, connectivity, green development, emerging technologies, as well as the interface between all these topics and science.
While in Marseille, Pons stressed the need to build co-operation based on complementarity, highlighting the MCSD’s and the PA’s mutual focus on the environmental and sustainable development agenda and shaping the global response to the triple planetary crisis of pollution, loss of biodiversity and climate change. He noted that the OSCE PA looks forward to bringing its distinct parliamentary contribution to the valuable work of the MCSD to step up advocacy for a green recovery and to advance the sustainability agenda in the Mediterranean region and beyond.
The MCSD was established in 1996 as an advisory body to the state parties of the Barcelona Convention, assisting national efforts to integrate environmental issues in national socioeconomic programmes and to promote sustainable development policies in the Mediterranean region. As a new Member of the MCSD, the OSCE PA is eager to bring its distinct parliamentary contribution to its work, and especially in the context of developing a new Mediterranean Strategy for Sustainable Development 2025-2030, which will need to be duly aligned to the 2030 Development Agenda, Pons pointed out.
