Malta submits emissions plan and avoids EU legal action

Malta will not be among the EU member states that will today receive a letter of formal notice from Brussels due to their failure to submit a plan on how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions up to 2012.

Commission sources told The Times yesterday Malta submitted its National Allocation Plan (NAP) last week and thus avoided the start of legal proceedings at the eleventh hour. The sources said that although Malta's submission was three months late, the Commission decided there was no need to launch infringement procedures.

This is not the case with nine other member states which until yesterday had still not informed the EU executive about their emissions plans.

The Commission said it will start legal proceedings against Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain.

Originally, member states had until the end of last June to hand in their climate change details according to the EU's emission trading scheme.

EU laws lay down that member states have to cut their global carbon dioxide emissions by nine per cent over a period of years ending in 2012.

In order to reach its targets, in 2005 the EU set in motion a new mechanism known as the Emissions Trading Scheme which enables greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector and energy-intensive industrial plants in the 25 EU member states to be cut at the least cost to the economy.

With this scheme, pollutant installations are allocated a certain number of carbon dioxide emission allowances by their governments every year (one allowance gives an installation the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide). Installations that keep their emissions below their total of allowances, for instance, by investing in more energy-efficient equipment, can sell their surplus allowances to those that emit more than their allocated allowances. This "cap and trade" approach ensures that emissions are cut wherever it is cheapest to do so.

Malta is not considered to be a "big pollutant" and its carbon dioxide emissions in 2000 amounted to only 0.04 per cent of all the emissions of the 25 member states.

Latest data available shows that the only two pollutant installations in Malta, the power stations of Delimara and Marsa, produced almost two million tones of carbon dioxide in 2003. This is much lower than the almost nine million tonnes allocated to Malta by the Commission for the first three-year period of the scheme.

The next stage of the scheme will cover the four-year period between 2008-2012.