After the constitution of the parliamentary committees was confirmed at European Parliament’s first plenary after the European Elections, the committees themselves held their first meetings as well. Readers of EuChemS Magazine may may be familiar with the committees on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) which are the ones working on science-policy topics relevant to EuChemS. It’s also worth noting that ENVI and ITRE became the two largest parliamentary committees of this term, each constituting of 90 Members.
ENVI and ITRE held their constitutive meetings on 23 July, where the members elected Chairs and Vice-Chairs. The elected chair of ENVI, the Italian Antonio Decaro comes from the centre-left party Socialist & Democrats. Alongside his background in politics, he also has technical experience as a civil engineer – however, it is his first mandate as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). ITRE’s elected chair, Borys Budka comes from Poland, and it is his first term as an MEP. He is a member of the centre-right European People’s Party. While he has a background in law, he also engaged in academia, as a professor the Department of Energy Transformation in Katowice.
The committees are set to work on science-policy dossiers, such as the revision of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals legislation, or negotiations on the 10th EU Research Framework Programme (FP10) amongst other topics. Therefore, in both committees, a number of MEPs have research and laboratory management experience, with some of them being active researchers. Their work began as soon as the following day, when ITRE met to discuss the funding of the Horizon Programme.
