European Week of Regions and Cities

06:10 - 15:52

Dubravka Šuica

So as I said, economy is also important and small businesses, SMEs, everything is important for your regions, for your cities. So we want the Pact, under the Pact, to create the conditions for people to thrive in the local communities. This is why we created Start Up for Med to support small and medium enterprises and startups in our regions. This initiative focuses especially on young people and women entrepreneurs, which is very important. Of course, it provides training, monitoring, networking and access to finance, because for women access to finance is sometimes very difficult.

So we are trying to support this through our Social Entrepreneurship Fund. The fund mobilizes 80 million euro to support social enterprises across the Mediterranean. And it is also backed by 7 million euro in technical assistance that will help us reach more than 136,000 people promoting jobs, gender equality, environmental sustainability and so on. This was the same, the same reason why last month during the UNGA in New York, I launched the Surging Women Employment Initiative.

And this is a main deliverable of the start for startup for Med, and it will create half million, 500,000 jobs for women across our region, from science and technology to the health and healthcare economy. You know that healthcare economy is at the moment we badly need this, knowing that we are longevity continent and knowing that we need care workers and we have to really, we have to anticipate this whenever we design our policies, we have to anticipate this fact, which is that we are growing older, Spanish people are I think the oldest in Europe, but okay, but you are a little bit better in birth rate, so fine. Just to know that we need to stay at 2.1 per woman if we want to stay stable as we are now. At this moment, the average, the average rate in Europe is 1.34, so it's disaster at the moment, just to make you aware of this. So we have to support the potential of our people where they live, where they live, and it is core of it.

Yesterday we promoted right to stay together with Executive Vice-President Raffaele Fitto. Right to stay could be considered as the fifth freedom of the European Union because it's fine, we have freedom to move, but we should have also freedom to stay. In order to achieve freedom to stay, we really need to invest, not only to attract businesses, but we need to invest in social infrastructure, in facilities, so kindergartens, nursery homes should be affordable and accessible to people in the region. This is the reason why they will stay, also, also education, also culture, but we have to create conditions. And this is why cohesion policy is very important.

You know that we are now speaking about new MFF, Multiannual Financial Framework, it's a little bit more than noise, but it doesn't mean that cohesion policy and agriculture policy will be, will be deleted. And the day after tomorrow, or tomorrow, tomorrow there will be European Council, leaders will meet and this will be very important meeting when they will start discussing on MFF. So it's very important that you transmit the message to your leaders to, to support the idea of new Multiannual Financial Framework. It's not only about Global Europe, which I am representing, because we need money for the whole region and for global initiatives, but we need also money for people who, as people from Balearic or other regions, they have the right to stay. And this is something we have to understand and to, to promote.

Of course, growing local economy means growing energy needs at stable prices. You know that energy price at the moment are the hot topic, hot topic all across Europe. We of course want to invest in renewables, and this is why we are attracting not Spanish, but all European companies to come, I'm now connecting this with my portfolio in the Southern Mediterranean just to understand, to come to invest in that part of the world where we can produce renewable energy and much, at much lower price than in Denmark, than in Germany, than in Baltics and Northern Europe due to of course lower labor costs and other issues. So we are, we are speaking about homegrown energy, which we need to have not to be dependent on Russia and other fossil fuels and so on, but at the same time we have to find way how to produce energy there because they have plenitude of resources, but they don't have, they don't have technology, they don't have money, they don't have funding. The only problem is, we can produce energy at 40% lower price than in Europe.

The only problem is how to import this energy to Europe, so we need to build interconnectors. This is not my core job, but the my job is to attract companies and then my colleague Jørgensen will come in with his energy portfolio.

So what we need to build interconnectors. At the moment, there is one interconnector being built between Tunisia and Italy because this is the shortest distance between Africa and Europe. But we need one between Spain and Morocco, another one which is in procedure of administrative barriers between Egypt and Greece. So and this if we have on interconnectors, then we can have this energy in Europe and this Southern Mediterranean becomes very important for us. And this is not only this is not the only reason, but one of the reasons why President von der Leyen, just wanted to give you general overview, why she decided to establish new portfolio and new Directorate-General DG MENA is in fact because of this new philosophy around Mediterranean.

It's not it's also about climate change, it's also about migration, but this one is very, very important. Energy becomes the most important issue. So precisely to support these growing energy needs, we launched Team Med, so-called Team Med, but it's Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy and Clean Tech Initiative. And this initiative brings 5 billion euro in guarantees to the table and they should mobilize up to 25 billion euro in investments in renewable energy, green hydrogen, clean tech manufacturing and modern grids. For example, one we are at the moment we are building grid in helping build grid in Egypt, for example.

These investments are mostly focused on the Southern neighborhood, as I already said. Our goal is to protect our energy security, providing the supply we need in regions with high energy demands like yours. And we come to the third point, which is climate change, which you mentioned, President. So warming is 20% faster than the global average in the Mediterranean region. You we saw all of us, we witnessed what happened this summer.

Europe and North Africa suffered several heatwaves leading to wildfires, to drought. And in order to tackle wildfires, we created, as you know, we created, as you know, European firefighting hub in Cyprus, which is East Mediterranean. So we want to open more hubs. We know that there is an idea to build a hub in your region. I think it it is it is prudent because East Mediterranean is too far to bring Canadair planes if wildfire starts.

So in Cyprus, we already have six aircraft already contributing and they already contributed to combat this year's fire season in Europe, also in Europe and the region, of course. I have to mention water, which is priority for our communities, especially true for islands. I know that you have water reserves, but this year down to historic lows, as you said. This is why we are putting forward a European Water Resilience Strategy focused on improving water management across our communities. We have a Commissioner who is in charge for water, which is Swedish colleague Jessica Roswall.

So everything is covered with our portfolios, with our DGs, but of course, we have to make it work on the ground. Under the Pact for the Mediterranean, we are preparing a new regional initiative which will be dedicated to strengthening Mediterranean water resilience. It will be launched next year. We want to better connect water management authorities with capacity building in the European Union and our partner countries.

Of course, information sharing is crucial to support credible, bankable water investments. And we hope that these initiatives can support your institutions as you champion climate resilient tourism, providing real benefits for the people across Mediterranean. And these regions depend mainly on tourism. It is as it is because geography cannot be changed. But to be dependent on tourism is very risky nowadays.

15:52 - 16:19

But this is as it is in our countries. So, I only want to say that migration management and security is also are also key priorities under the Pact for the Mediterranean. There is a commissioner who is in charge, Magnus Brunner. But I am working on external dimension of migration, he works on internal. We are now, as you rightly mentioned, we adopted this Pact for Asylum and Migration.

16:19 - 16:44

It's in force as of June this year. We hope that this will help a lot. And we are now becoming more serious and more, I think, prudent when we speak about migration. Of course, I don't want to mention the Ceuta case because if I start talking about this, it will take whole morning. But we are trying to see how we can better keep our external border safe.

16:44 - 21:02

Dubravka Šuica

And there is a new idea which President von der Leyen proposed yesterday to the leaders in her letter on migration. As I already said, they will meet tomorrow, where she proposed, and this is what she proposed also in her State of Union speech, to establish emergency mechanism so that we can launch it immediately when something like Ceuta happens again. Hope it won't happen anymore, anywhere. So, migration is important issue, but I don't want to broader this discussion. At this moment, we have 150 million euro from NDICI supporting these actions under the Pact.

And this is complementing by additional resources for which I already mentioned, Erasmus+, Horizon, Asylum Migration Integration Fund, and there are many other EU financial instruments. And I have to say this is just a beginning. So, this was the first iteration of the action plan. Now, by the end of, not by the end of this month, but beginning November, we will adopt new, second iteration of action plan. Which means Pact is not document, Pact is living document which is accompanied by iterations of action plan.

So, it's very important to stay connected with our DG NEAR, which is my directorate, to see whether some of your projects are plausible to be integrated into this action plan, and then they are bankable and they can be financed. This is something which is very concrete and pragmatic. So, we have to continue our cooperation and contacts. So, we, as I said, we designed the Pact to be adaptable to the needs of our regional and local communities. As I said, every six months, new action plan is will come.

Of course, we are planning also initiatives linked to youth, to culture, and climate change, as I already said. ARLEM, they are mapping territorial projects and they are useful to identify to identify synergies and connect existing initiatives. We also planning to invite the secretariat of the ARLEM committee as an observer to the launch of this new action plan, just to integrate everybody. So, we are very inclusive, just to make you aware. I think that Pact can only succeed if it is owned by our regions, by cities, universities, businesses, and our people.

And of course, you are essential. Your insight is crucial for the Pact to deliver, to see what can be changed, what can be improved, and how we can do it. This is why this week is very important. But I have to mention that we have also Union for Mediterranean, which is based in Barcelona. And we are supporting this Union for Mediterranean, helping them to to to be pragmatic.

And they are our implementing partners on the ground.

We need them. So there is an annual meeting which is scheduled to happen, to take place on the 26th of November. It's two days prior to elections, so I don't know whether the calendar will change, but I'm looking forward not to change the calendar because it will, regardless of the government, UfM will stay. UfM is very important, although it's not local, but just to understand, very important organization politically because there are 46 members of UfM, all Mediterranean countries and some other who wanted to become members. But this is the only organization where both Palestine and Israel sit together.

And this is important why we want to keep them together. We want to, this is not the only reason, but politically very important reason. So there is much more to say. I think my time is over. So looking forward to hearing your views, your ideas.

And we can always, as I said, the pact is adaptable, so we can always change. Nothing is written in the stone. So thank you so much.