For some time now, I have been following Polish plans to build a deep-water container port in the outer harbour of the city of Świnoujście in close cooperation with the citizens’ initiative “Lebensraum Vorpommern”. This port project would affect several Natura 2000 sites and could have catastrophic environmental impacts.

According to European law, Poland is obliged to carry out a national environmental impact assessment (IA) before the start of the project and to propose possible compensatory measures. Apart from the information that an IA is in progress, the Polish side has been keeping a very low profile for more than a year; at the same time, the associated infrastructure is already being built locally and an investor is being sought for the large-scale project.

Because of the project’s proximity to the German-Polish border, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania can demand an independent cross-border environmental assessment on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the course of the formation of the government in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the cabinet reshuffle, however, the deadline for this was about to expire, especially since the former Minister of Infrastructure, Christian Pegel, had moved to the Ministry of the Interior.

Together with Claudia Müller, a member of the Bundestag, and Harald Terpe, the leader of the Green Party in the Mecklenburg state parliament, I wrote an open letter to the new Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure, Reinhard Meyer, reminding him of the deadline and the politically explosive nature of the port project. In the course of this, the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania announced its participation in the environmental assessment – a great success for our commitment!

You can find the letter to Minister Meyer here.