Patchy progress in ‘greening’ EU policies across the board

Date: 10/02/2000

By Gareth Harding

IN RECENT years, integration of the environment into other policy areas has become one of those Brussels 'buzz-phrases' which is as difficult to avoid as it has been to put into practice.

Politicians pepper their speeches with the slogan in the hope that constantly repeating the mantra will turn their aspirations into reality, and so many reports have been written on the subject that it threatens to create the EU's biggest paper mountain.

Although integration has been a stated aim of the Union since the late 1980s, it is only since the Amsterdam Treaty's entry into force that environmental concerns have had to be placed at the heart of other policy areas such as transport, energy and agriculture. For the first time, the new treaty legally requires ecological protection to be integrated into all the Union's policies and activities in order to promote sustainable development.

The European Commission and EU governments have been trying to put this noble principle into practice ever since, with decidedly mixed results. The Commission set out its thoughts in a policy paper which called for detailed environmental assessments to accompany all major proposals and for existing Union policies to be reviewed to judge whether the integration principle has been fully applied.

Governments have also been hard at work drawing up strategies since the Cardiff European summit in June 1998. Plans for integrating environmental concerns into the agricultural, energy and transport sectors have been agreed by EU leaders; similar reports have recently been rubber-stamped by development, internal market and industry ministers; and their finance, foreign affairs and fisheries counterparts will have to produce papers by June next year.

Some of these reports contain clear-sighted strategies for tackling and preventing environmental damage in their sectors. For example, a hard-hitting paper drawn up by transport ministers sets out a number of far-reaching measures to curb the environmental destruction caused by rampant traffic growth.

Likewise, farm ministers can claim some credit for taking the first steps towards greening the EU's massive agricultural budget in the Agenda 2000 programme.

However, the vast majority of the strategies are little more than literature reviews containing a thorough analysis of the problems but no new policies for putting them right.

A recent Commission assessment of the papers says that "progress is clearly uneven" and calls for further efforts to meet the Union's treaty commitments. Bemoaning the absence of clear targets and timetables, the EU executive recommends that "more focus should be put on addressing the origin of problems rather than seeking to abate the effects with end-of-line solutions".

The Copenhagen-based European Environment Agency is even more damning in its conclusions. In a study of four Council of Ministers' reports, it says progress is slow and that the agriculture, energy, transport and industry sectors still have a "long way to go towards effective integration".

Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström believes that integration of the environment into other policy areas is the key to meeting Europe's climate-change goals and converting the EU's rhetoric about sustainable development into practice.

The Commissioner has already produced a paper for President Romano Prodi's group on 'sustainability, growth and competitiveness' outlining what needs to be done in this area and the forthcoming sixth environmental action programme promises to have integration at its core.

But green groups say that until the EU stops funding the construction of thousands of miles of roads and propping up polluting industries with state subsidies, it will be difficult to take the Commission's pious exhortations seriously.

Article forms part of a survey 'Environment'.