The workers in Europe and other countries experience the consequences of the longstanding policies that have been pursued regarding the environment, consequences that are particularly serious:

• With the contamination of water resources
• Floods
• Burnt forests
• Constant soil erosion
• Air pollution
• The reduction of free green spaces in urban and semi-urban areas
• The further commercialization of land

In addition, there is a chain reaction of consequences in the food production chain, where the people’s needs are sacrificed at the altar of the profitability of the monopolies, as the recent gathering of the monopolies and their unions at the EXPO in Milan demonstrated.

The peoples are increasingly denied the possibility of enjoying natural beauty, beaches, forests, parks and are paying a high price for their commodification.

Waste management has developed into privileged terrain for the profitability of the monopolies, creating serious dangers for public health.

The EU bears enormous responsibilities for this situation, as it promotes the reactionary rationale of the “polluter pays”. The intensifying downgrading and destruction of the natural environment at a European and international level, the increasing commodification of the natural resources reveal even more sharply the outcomes of the capitalist path of development.

It is on this terrain that the sharpening of the contradictions of the capitalist states internationally manifests itself over the control of the markets, the setting of goals, the control mechanisms and the distribution of funding in order to deal with climate change. This competition is expected to sharpen before the signing of an International Climate Agreement, which will serve the interests of the monopolies, at the Paris Summit that will be held this year in December.

The environment will be endangered as long as the private ownership of the means of production exists. The conscious planned and balanced impact of man on nature can only exist in a society that is based on the social ownership of all the natural resources and the means for their utilization, on central planning, on production with social prosperity as its criterion.

In order to pave the way for this hopeful prospect, the communist and workers parties that participate in the Initiative struggle every day for the protection of:

• The forests and aquifer
• The free spaces and the work environment
• For the creation of earthquake and flood protection
• For the creation of a single public organization for waste management and the total management of water resources exclusively by the state

The broad masses of workers must take a position in this struggle, in which the communist and workers parties are in the frontline, against the interests of the monopolies and the EU.