Union struggles to fulfil pledge to put green issues at heart of policy-making

Date: 10/02/2000

By Gareth Harding

There is a curious paradox at the heart of EU environment policy at the start of the new millennium.

After almost 30 years of Union action to clean up the environment, there are more rules and regulations than ever before, the condition of the continent's natural resources is better chronicled than ever, and Europe's citizens know more about the challenges facing the planet than at any time in the past.

Yet, as the European Environment Agency's (EEA) latest research shows, the state of the EU's environment is getting worse, not better. This is graphically illustrated by an EEA table charting the progress made in the last five to ten years and the prospects for change in the next decade.

Using smiling faces to represent positive developments, passive expressions to denote limited but insufficient progress, and frowning features to warn of unfavourable trends, what is striking is the almost complete absence of merry grins.

This is not to say that no progress has been made. There has been a drastic reduction in emissions of lead from exhausts, sulphur dioxide from smokestacks and a cocktail of lethal chemicals which eat away at the earth's ozone layer. Likewise, both air and water quality are expected to improve over the next decade as strict legislation passed in recent years begins to have an impact.

However, EEA director Domingo Jiménez-Beltrán points out that "even where we have succeeded in reducing emissions, in general we have seldom been able to detect any improvement in the state of the environment itself".

Soils continue to deteriorate, the volume of waste is still rising, and chemicals continue to pose a problem; Europe's rivers, lakes and seas still have high nutrient concentrations; smog blights the continent's cities every summer; and natural habitats are increasingly under threat from urban sprawl and road construction.

But the most worrying environmental problem facing the Union is undoubtedly climate change. Rising emissions of greenhouse gases are threatening to blow a hole in the EU's legally-binding commitment to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) and a basket of other pollutants by 8% between 2008-12.

The main culprit is the exorbitant rise in transport emissions, which are expected to account for almost one-third of CO₂ emissions by 2010. Since 1980 the number of air passengers has doubled, car transport has jumped by 60% and freight traffic has increased by three-quarters. Yet EU governments appear unwilling to take the difficult political decisions needed to curb rampant traffic growth and money from the Union's coffers still subsidises the construction of thousands of kilometres of new roads in Europe's poorer countries.

In order to meet the EU's climate-change goals, the European Commission is urging member states to tax polluting energy sources, drastically increase the use of renewables such as wind and solar power and cut emissions from the transport, industry and agricultural sectors. But the institution's pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears in the continent's capitals.

The Commission realises that end-of-pipe solutions to the Union's most pressing environmental problems are no longer enough, and over the past seven years it has been busy drawing up a series of strategies to integrate ecological concerns into other policy areas.

The institution's end-of-term report on the EU's fifth environmental action programme, which was launched in 1992 and expires at the end of this year, concludes that the Union is still a long way from its goal of placing conservation concerns at the heart of its other policies. Its assessment of the stack of integration strategies produced by EU governments is hardly more flattering, describing member states' progress as "uneven" and attacking the strategy papers for failing to set clear targets.

Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström wants the EU's next environmental blueprint, which will be unveiled later this year, to focus like a laser on putting the principle of sustainable development into practice. "We do not need more visions and more explanations of what sustainability is, we need 15 concrete points setting out how to achieve it," she told European Voice.

Rather than drawing up more legislation, Wallström believes the priority for the next five years must be to force member states to comply fully with the 200 environmental laws currently in force.

The Commission launched more than 470 legal actions against governments for failing to respect Union environmental legislation last year and Wallström has indicated that she intends to clamp down further on persistent offenders during her stint as environment supremo.

Over the course of the year, the Swedish Commissioner is planning to organise four 'name and shame' seminars which will identify the best and worst countries at implementing legislation. She is also threatening to stop sending billions of euro of EU funds to member states which ignore the Union's nature-protection laws. "It is not right to give money with one hand and fine member states with the other," she says.

Green groups are dubious about moving away from the 'command and control' methods used in the past, and their misgivings were underlined in a recent poll carried out for the Commission. Asked which were the best methods of solving environmental problems, just under half said stricter legislation coupled with heavy fines, while less than 10% favoured self-regulation by industry.

Although eco-activists may grumble about Wallström's tactics, few doubt the former Swedish minister's ability to push environmental concerns to the top of the political agenda. Dynamic, determined and well-briefed, Wallström is one of the few media stars in the new Commission and her first 100 days in office have been a lot more successful than those of her gaffe-prone predecessor Ritt Bjerreggard.

Long-awaited policy papers on environmental liability, the precautionary principle and hormone-disrupting chemicals have been published to the predictable howls of protest from green groups and industry, a raft of air quality proposals has been successfully steered through the Council of Ministers and the Commission won plaudits for its handling of last month's international bio-safety talks in Montreal.

In her bid to put the Union on a more sustainable footing, Wallström has found an improbable ally in the Council of Ministers. With five Green environment ministers and most of the others hailing from centre-left parties, the current Council is probably the greenest ever and this is having a noticeable effect on EU environment policy.

In recent years, member states have strengthened Commission proposals on exhaust emissions and fuel quality, dropped their long-standing opposition to strategic environmental assessments and adopted a hardline stance at global conservation talks.

However, in an ironic twist of fate, the European Parliament - which has traditionally been the greenest of the Union's three law-making bodies - has adopted a much more conservative approach to environmental policy since the centre-right's victory in last June's Euro-poll.

To the fury of both the Commission and Council, a planned law on recycling scrap vehicles was watered down last week and some of the more far-reaching amendments passed by the assembly's environment committee in recent months have failed to secure a majority in the full house. This has prompted Dutch Green MEP Alexander de Roo to warn that the "Parliament has tried to make the Council's positions greener for the past 20 years and now we are in danger of reversing that role".

Wallström believes that as a result of the new political situation in Parliament, Commissioners "might have to be the ones taking a more radical approach" in the future.

It is an attitude which is likely to send shivers down the back of industry, which has campaigned long and hard to soften the Commission's more stringent proposals. But green campaigners believe that nothing short of a revolution in the EU's way of thinking will be enough to prevent the slow but steady deterioration of Europe's environment.

Major feature. Article forms part of a survey 'Environment'.