 So, ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached the very important closing session. But before we proceed, let me make a short announcement. There will be a bus leaving for the airport at ten minutes past two. Ten minutes past two. It's a great pleasure to have with us now the Director General of the Environment of the European Commission and the Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Mrs. Egli Bandelaki. I give the floor first to Mrs. Egli Bandelaki for the concluding remarks by the Cyprus presidency and then to Mr. Fakenberg, Director General of the European Commission. Thank you very much, Kiriakos. Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, we now come to the end of the thorough and fruitful conference. We have had one and a half days of interesting discussions on a range of critical issues on the Commission's communication and blueprint to safeguard Europe's water resources, which was adopted on the 14th of November, 2012. As Minister Aledravis stressed yesterday, the Cyprus presidency of the Council of the European Union has fully supported the Commission's initiative to prepare and present the blueprint and spares no effort to prepare the ground for placing before the December Environment Council a proposal for relevant council conclusions. This, despite the very tight time limits we are faced with. Water is essential for human life, the environment and the economy. Water scarcity is a major global challenge given that fresh water constitutes only about 2% of the water on the planet and that competing demands may lead to an estimated 40% global water supply shortage by 2030. While the EU Water Framework Directive established the objective to achieve good status of all EU waters by 2015, the European Environment Agency's State of Water reports and the Commission's assessment of the member states' river basin management plans indicate that this objective is likely to be achieved only in 53% of European Union waters. Therefore, additional action including better implementation of the Water Framework Directive is needed to preserve and improve EU waters. We need to focus on green growth and become more resource efficient to achieve a sustainable recovery from the current economic and environmental crisis, adapt to climate change and build resilience to disasters. Tackling these challenges holds significant potentials to boost the competitiveness, growth and employment of the European water sector, as well as other water related sectors where innovation can increase operational efficiency. In this context, we welcome the Commission's communication, a blueprint to safeguard Europe's water resources as an instrument to help the EU and its member states achieve the Water Framework Directive's goals. This is expected to be done mainly by ensuring the sustainability of all activities that impact water, thereby contributing to securing the availability of good quality water for sustainable and equitable water use and the ecosystems. The proposed actions of the blueprint are also expected to contribute positively to the goal of halting the laws of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services as well as to the efforts in combating desertification and adapting to climate change. It is important to note that the blueprint recognizes that the aquatic environments differ greatly across the European Union and does not propose any one-size-fits-all solution. It rather proposes a toolbox from which member states can choose the most appropriate measures or mix of measures. It should also be highlighted that it is generally accepted that the currently unique framework on water is extensive, flexible and essentially fits to address the challenges faced by the aquatic environment. However, key actions need to be taken to address old and emerging challenges. There is a need for better implementation of the current water legislation and increased integration of water policy objectives into other policy areas such as the common agricultural policy, the cohesion and structural funds, and the policies on renewable energy, urban planning, transport and integrated disaster management. Furthermore, good and effective water governance and reliable funding, both public and private, are key for implementing any policies, plans or measures. Therefore, adequate priority must be given to water policy objectives under national and EU funds. Also, adaptation to the potential impacts of climate change should be integrated into water management decisions and hydro-morphological pressures in river basins must be reduced by using, whenever possible, green infrastructure and best available techniques. The goal is to reduce vulnerability to floods and droughts, support biodiversity and land fertility, and improve the quality of water. The EU Floods Directive requires the development of flood risk management plans by 2015, which need to be taken into account when developing cross-sectoral and multi-hazard risk management plans. There is a need to correct overallocation and overuse of water, where they occur, and to address the use of illegal water abstraction. Diffuse and point source pollution still threaten the status of EU waters, and hazardous chemicals continue to have a significant adverse impact on the environment and human health, despite the progress achieved under legislation on nitrates, wastewater treatment, industrial emissions, priority substances, chemicals, biocides, and plant protection products. Efforts must be enhanced towards a full implementation of the above legislation, while the private sector must also be involved in order to secure long-term investment plans in these areas. Water efficiency can help reduce water scarcity and water stress problems. The use of incentive water pricing, which is an effective tool to increase water efficiency, must be enhanced in line with the water framework directive based on volumetric metering where needed. There is also a need to manage water demand by improving irrigation efficiency and other measures, whereas the setting of common EU-wide environmental and health standards for water reuse would help alleviate water scarcity, reduce vulnerability, and promote long-term investment plans for waste water treatment. Regarding droughts, the further development of the European wide early warning system for droughts, and we are applicable to the integration of drought risk management and climate change aspects into other river basin management planning, could help to improve drought management. The importance of reviewing current funding opportunities with regard to their ability to tackle issues of water scarcity and droughts and address emergency drought situations should also be underlined. The European Union and its member states must also continue the strengthening of international cooperation through support for access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation for all, as well as integrated water management in third countries and the improvement of transpoundary cooperation with a view to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals Agenda 21 and the Rio Plus 20 outcome. Dear friends, on behalf of the Cyprus presidency of the Council of the EU, I thank you again for your participation and your valuable contribution. I wish you all a safe trip home and hope you enjoyed your stay in Cyprus. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Pandelakis, for the concluding remarks by the Cyprus presidency. I now pass the floor to Mr. Karl Falkenberg for the conclusions drawn from the conference by the European Commission. Thank you, Kiriakos, and thank you, Egli, for your summing up of the work of this conference. And even if I have only joined the conference yesterday evening at the time of the reception, i.e. after the work, I have listened to the discussions this morning and I want to say that to me also it looks a very well-organized, good, interesting conference with many, many issues surrounding the water problematic. I think you have summed up the work of this conference quite extensively, so I will be a little bit less systematic in my remarks. I think what I first and foremost take back from here is a recognition for the Commission's team of the way in which the blueprint has been prepared in an extremely participatory manner, a process that in many of the discussions that I have had, I have heard and felt from you, both from the administration side, from the NGO, from the academic side, that you had the impression that you had your word to say in the process and that you understand what we have come up with. I also heard a lot of recognition for the, I call it the soft style of the blueprint. We have analyzed the water policies from many angles. We have not immediately gone to fast, hard solutions, but I think it's also very important not to misunderstand the blueprint. We are not where we want to be, and in order to get to the good water status that we are aiming for, we will need to make additional efforts, and the blueprint is opening those avenues. They're not one fits all solutions, but the fact that it is not a one fit all solution in the blueprint does not mean that you effectively can pick and choose what you like and what you don't like. You have to make the choices with the objective of reaching the overall targets, the good status of our waters. I was very much reassured that during the conference I understand there was only one voice putting into question the overall target of the water framework directive. Only a Spanish voice I heard was feeling that this objective may be too expensive or too difficult to reach. I think we need to draw the conclusion from there that the vast majority of the Europeans feel that it can be done, that it is worth the effort of doing it, and that it has to be done in a timely manner, and that the deadlines, the targets that the water framework directive sets continue to be binding on us, that the target to deliver river basin management plans, even if behind us still is relevant for a limited number of member states who haven't yet delivered, but who we will continue to very solidly remind of their obligation to come up with a management plan that is going to have to be the basis for making the overall appreciation of how we can bring into a better balance the water that we regularly produce in Europe or that is made available through nature in Europe and the water that we abstract and use in Europe. I think it's quite clear to me that the overall water account in Europe is still not in good balance and that in the different regions the imbalances are at times still very much of concern. So we need to address a number of different elements in the way forward. I have started talking about the quantitative aspect. I think we need to push our reflection in the direction of better balancing our water abstraction here in Europe, but obviously also worldwide. You have reminded us of the gap that worldwide we are going to see in the coming years. So water efficiency, better use of water is and continues a very important element and for that obviously we need to have better information. This morning we had a session on knowledge. We can only develop water accounts if we monitor. We don't monitor, we don't measure, we will not have proper accounts, we don't have proper knowledge of what water is available. I challenge anyone to tell us how we would make sensible management plans for a scarce resource. In the same time for this scarce resource the quality of water is a concern and remains a concern. We still are seeing in too many of our surface waters pollution. We need to make sure that the qualitative aspect even if we have achieved quite some good results with the implementation of the water framework directive, nitrates, etc. we see that we are moving in the right direction, that we can achieve better results, but we are not there and we need to make sure that we take the necessary measures which I think I also have understood in the discussion this morning and some of the talks yesterday evening still a lot will depend on integrating with other policies. For me it was very good to hear from a number of water directors that the silo approach is no longer fashionable, that it is understood that water cannot only be handled by water directors but that we need to talk to directors in other policy areas, whether it's broad areas such as soil, chemical substances, etc., or whether it is even international issues like international trade, etc. All of this has to be seen together, agriculture plays a crucial role but it's also very clear to me that agriculture is not the only sector and in the discussion that we had here this morning and the focus of what changes do we want to see in agricultural policies. To me it's always very important to be thinking about the fact that in a river basin management plan we try to allocate water to a number of different uses, to urban demands, to industrial demands, to agricultural demands, all of those we have to take into account, we have to focus on how an allocation makes sense and how the different actors can best participate. Sanitation has been highlighted throughout also and I think it's a logical fact that we highlight sanitation that we talk about wastewater and how we can reuse wastewater. A lot of issues on which we will in Brussels continue to have to come to grips with what are the best means to achieving, the goals that we collectively want to achieve. Is it regulation? Is it market instruments in brackets pricing measures? Is it awareness? My own experiences that you need a little bit of all of those things and the challenge that we will have to face in the future and that we will together have to face is to how do we weigh these different elements and how do they play together? It's not going to be all regulation but there will have to be regulation. I had a quick talk yesterday during the reception over a glass of excellent white wine with someone from the industry side who was telling me in order for industry to continue to innovate we need to know what are the rules of the game. We need regulation so that we can drive innovation and it's probably in that sense that it will work more effectively than if we try to wait for innovation, diffuse innovation which we will then use to regulate. But this discussion will continue to be very, very challenging and I'm looking forward to continuing it on a very wide basis with all of the different stakeholders that have been here at this conference and with whom we will have to develop these ideas further. In that context there's always going to be the question of over-regulation and particularly in Europe, surprisingly particularly at European level, we regularly are questioned whether we haven't over-regulated. Is EU regulation over-regulated? I hear this question basically every day in Brussels. Sometimes I think it would be very good if in the national capitals people were asking whether national legislation is over-regulated. Because sometimes I do think that European legislation is less prescriptive and is more respectful of subsidiarity than examples of national regulation that I know. But because we are so often criticized, it's very good for me also to just share with you one of the findings of the survey that we did in developing the blueprint on whether you think that there is unnecessary administrative burden. And the answers that we get tell us that 74 percent of stakeholders, water authorities and the wider stakeholders feel that the administrative burden of implementing the EU water policy is acceptable, 74 percent. Only 26 seem to think that there are excessive administrative demands. Now 75 percent is not perfect, but I think is a very good starting point to at least have the impression that we haven't done things completely wrong. We will work with the 26 percent that think we can do things more efficiently. And that is also one of the aspects that we have taken into account in producing the blueprint, leaving options and working with subsidiarity as a key element. But I also very often have to remind everyone that subsidiarity only works in the context of an overall established common policy. If you don't have common agreed policy goals, you cannot talk about subsidiarity, you then simply talk about national policy making. And I think that's something that we also need to keep in mind. If we want to have a way in which we address water challenges at our regional, local and global level adequately, then we need to have adequate targets developed at the overall and for Europeans, that's the European level, and to leave sufficient flexibility for national, regional, local authorities to see what are the consequences of the overall policy on their respective areas and their respective water challenges. We had a session this morning on international, which I also thought was very interesting. And I have come back from Rio before the summer, so I am very much aware that we're not only facing water problems in Europe, but that we have global challenges, and most of the other regions of the planet in fact have a far more challenging water reality than we here in Europe. Therefore working with partners on the definition of sustainable development goals is going to be a real challenge over the next few years. We have highlighted all the way into the conference and through the conference that water is a challenge that deserves to be addressed. Water in the sense of which it was discussed here, but also in the wider sense of oceans, not only sweet water, but also salt water related issues will have to be dealt with in the sustainable development discussion. And in this discussion obviously we will see once more all the interlinkages with all other policies. We will have to talk about poverty, we will have to talk about social inclusion, we will have to talk about food, we will have to talk about all the challenges that are out there and that are very closely interrelated. I thought it was very good to hear here that a narrow focus on one challenge, even if it is a huge challenge like climate change is not appropriate, something I have been arguing for for quite some time now, we will continue to make mistakes if we only look from a single perspective at these challenges. It's too simple to just look at water issues and make mistakes. It's too simple to look at just soil issues or just climate issues and make mistakes. We need this interactive discussion and the wider perspective. We need to work together and I think that's also something that I definitely take back from this conference, the necessity to find the appropriate solutions. In this regard perhaps just one very quick word on the cap and on the mid-term financial perspective that Europe is facing. We made a choice about a year and a half ago with Janesh Potocnik in trying to define what financial means do we want to secure over the next financial period for environment. We made the choice that we were not trying to go for a substantively bigger chunk of the finance directly attributed to environment, but we wanted to green the budgets of our colleagues in agriculture, in the regional fund, in research and development, etc. This was a very conscious decision. We continue to believe that in this way we can get much more leverage on much larger funds than if we were fighting for our own little quarter. Just to give you numbers, my DG environment budget is annually something like 400 million euros. But we have in the past by greening other budgets spent annually something like 12 billion euros a year from the EU budget on environmentally relevant measures. Our own proposal for the next period was to try to multiply by three that number. That's also one of the reasons why we obviously have looked with a lot of attention to pillar one in the agricultural area. Because whether you like it or not, whether you think pillar two is more environmentally sound than pillar one, the money is in pillar one. And the way the discussion is going in the council seems to confirm to us that that's where it's going to stay. And therefore I think we made the right choice in making sure that our existing environmental legal requirements like in the water framework directive are relevant for cross compliance in pillar one. I think it's something that is absolutely normal. I find it very difficult to imagine that the European taxpayer would continue to support an economic activity not respecting existing EU legislation. So we will continue to argue in this direction. We will continue to argue on all fronts in the direction of making sure that the environment is taken into account as and when we further develop our European policies in all other areas. And we will certainly also take up all these issues in the next two days with the continuation of the specific work on water with the water director's meeting that I understand will start as from tomorrow. So I wish that work good luck. I enjoyed listening to the discussions and I want one more time to thank the separate delegation for having organized this conference. Thank you very much. Thank you, Carl, for the very clear, very constructive and very straight to the point conclusions and comments. So this brings us to the end of the conference. I would like to thank you all for participating. Your presence and interest was a key to the success of this conference. Let me remind you that there will be buses outside to take you to the various destinations that includes the hotels, the airport, and Limassol. That is for the water director's meeting. I would like to remind you that there is lunch downstairs in Halkos restaurant. Once again, I want to thank you for participating. Thank you very much.