Widespread condemnation of action programme review

Date: 30/05/1996

By Michael Mann

MEPS and 'green' lobbies are united in their condemnation of the European Commission's review of the Fifth Environmental Action Programme.

Where they differ is in their preferred approach for adding teeth to a proposal they claim lacks any targeted measures or deadlines for speeding up improvements in the state of the EU's environment in line with the goals set for 2000.

At their first hearing on the issue, attended by Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard, members of the European Parliament's environment committee rejected calls from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace for MEPs to throw out the proposals and demand that the Commission start again from scratch.

Dismissing such ideas as “politically crass”, committee chairman Ken Collins stressed this would add a year to the review process, already unlikely to be finalised before the summer of 1997 at the earliest.

Collins believes a more practical approach is to build on the measure by writing in firmer commitments and timetables for the achievement of set environmental goals.

This promises in turn to cause more than a little controversy in the Council of Ministers, with several member states seemingly intent on watering down the measure still further.

Austria, Sweden and Denmark - the traditional backers of tough environmental standards - are among those supporting the Parliament's approach.

But officials suggest that some of the larger member states, particularly Spain but also France and the UK, would be quite happy if the Commission's proposal emerged from the Maastricht Treaty's co-decision procedure unscathed.

The Fifth Environmental Action Programme was originally adopted on 18 March 1992 as a set of guidelines to cover moves towards a sustainable approach up to 2000.

It named five key areas on which the EU was to concentrate. These were to improve the integration of the environment in all policy areas, broaden the range of instruments to ensure environmental protection, improve enforcement, raise public awareness and play a stronger role in international environmental action. Particular attention was paid to increasing the use of market-based instruments.

Looking back on progress achieved to date, the Commission concluded that the greatest advances had been made in the manufacturing sector, the least in agriculture and tourism.

But success in reducing transport emissions was found to have been largely negated by the growth in traffic volumes, while the energy sector was judged still to be lacking the necessary incentives to move to a sustainable approach.

The Commission also concluded that there had been little progress in developing market-based tools at the EU level, while “changing attitudes has proved the most difficult task”.

WWF and Greenpeace dispute Commission claims that 70&percent; of the actions foreseen in the programme and falling under Community competence were achieved by the end of 1995.

MEPs and green lobbies are now beginning the struggle to persuade the Commission to commit itself to tougher goals and deadlines for policies in the five target areas of energy, manufacturing, transport, agriculture and forestry, and tourism.

Otherwise, they maintain, the tactics laid down in the 1992 programme will prove too weak to deal with the growing challenges facing the EU's environment.

Because it has co-decision making powers in this area, the Parliament should in theory have a fair degree of leverage, although experience suggests that MEPs will stop short of undermining the entire procedure.

Collins is hopeful that EU environment ministers will be able to reach a common position on the issue by the end of the year, a sentiment which is supported by member state officials who are preparing the ground for an orientation debate at the next ministerial meeting on 25-26 June.

However, there are clearly two very distinct schools of thought on the proposal among EU governments.

For the moment, member state officials are merely discussing the legal consequences of the review, with some countries doubtful that it will be in any way binding on national governments.

But this seems largely academic, given the lack of proposals to tighten targets set out in the original action programme for the period up to the year 2000.

Bjerregaard, who has been no stranger to controversy in the 16 months since she became a Commissioner in January 1995, has said it is an “excellent idea” for the committee to look at ways of strengthening the Commission's text.

But she is clearly worried that MEPs of all parties seem to be calling the whole programme into question.

The Commission believes that to include precise targets in a document which is supposed to be legally-binding would lead to involved negotiations on each and every point and hold up the adoption of the measure virtually indefinitely.

But environmental lobbyists claim Commission officials are apologetic about the approach taken to the mid-term review of a policy document initially adopted four years ago in the hope of moving the Union “towards sustainability” (the subtitle of the programme).

According to one green campaigner, the strategy adopted reflects a more general tendency within the institution to look for the “lowest common denominator” in most areas of environmental policy.

This, he maintains, has also shown up in current thinking on water and vehicle emission standards.

But member state officials point out that Bjerregaard would have found it extremely difficult to force the measure through the Commission had she pushed for anything more stringent.

They underline the problems which would be involved in, for example, persuading Directorate-General VI, which is responsible for agriculture, to integrate the environment more fully into EU farm policies.

Business representatives also stress the difficulties that policy-makers face in coming up with precise objectives for this sort of plan, particularly as so few member states have genuinely translated the plan into operational programmes at a national level.

But despite obvious shortcomings, officials at the European employers' federation UNICE have given the review procedure “a cautious welcome”. Stressing their satisfaction at the “clear recognition by the Commission of industry's role as not just a problem maker, but a problem solver”, UNICE officials believe the report on the success of the programme to date proves how well industry is getting to grips with the concept of sustainable development and integrating environmental concerns into all policy areas.

“Although business has problems with some features of the programme, there is at last a reference point against which all the actors can measure their performance,” said one official.

But she added that the one major flaw in the Commission's approach was that the time span allotted for the adoption of the review would leave very little time to attain new targets before the programme ends at the turn of the century.

WWF insists, however, that the Commission is doing nothing to provide the impetus necessary to reverse a downward trend in the quality of the EU's environment, setting no new priorities and not even reflecting the various international conventions to which the Union has signed up since its action programme first came into force.

This, it maintains, is particularly serious given that last year's report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) concluded that, far from moving towards sustainability, the Union was actually facing increasingly acute environmental difficulties.

Tony Long, director of WWF's European Policy Office, argues that “if the environment continues to be undervalued and ignored, in a very short space of time it will reach the limits of what it can absorb”.

Joining WWF in its call for the review to be rejected, Greenpeace goes even further, accusing the Commission of sacrificing the environment “to the mantra of promoting growth and competitiveness”. It adds: “The Commission's proposal illustrates its reckless lack of concern for the environment and the health and safety of Europe's citizens.”

The European Environmental Bureau, meanwhile, maintains that the Commission is basing its strategy on “a preferential alliance with the business sector, the shift towards voluntary agreements and standardisation”.

This reflects environmentalists' fears that the Directorate-General for the environment (DGXI) is increasingly concerned with presenting an acceptable face to industrial interests, rather than playing the role of the Commission's 'green conscience'.