EU marine strategy in the balance

EU environment ministers will on Monday seek to reach a political agreement on the draft Marine Strategy Directive.

The strategy, unveiled by the European Commission in October 2005, forms the environmental chapter of an even broader sea and coast land policy - the maritime policy. It aims to achieve good environmental status of the EU's marine waters by 2021 and to protect the resource base upon which marine-related economic and social activities depend.

The EU was and is still getting increasingly concerned with the rising threats to the marine environment. In 2002, the EU Sixth Environment Action Programme requested the development of a thematic strategy for the protection and conservation of the European marine environment. The communication which followed, entitled Towards A Strategy To Protect And Conserve The Marine Environment, was also welcomed by the EU environment ministers in 2003 who, in turn, requested an ambitious strategy by 2005.

To achieve the proposed good environmental standards, under the proposed directive, the EU requires member states to draw up and implement national strategies - which need to be approved by the Commission - in coordination with other countries that share the same waters. In these strategies, the member states should include a detailed assessment of the state of the environment, a definition of "good environmental status" (GES) at regional level and the establishment of clear environmental targets and monitoring programmes. The implementation of these strategies is then left to the established European marine regions on the basis of geographical and environmental criteria. The strategy is expected to cost the EU and its member states an annual E90 million in the first two years of implementation and an annual &eurp;70 million after that but the benefits could be many more times the costs.

However, a number of environmental groups branded the strategy "desperately inadequate" to deal with issues such as pollution at sea and over-fishing and said that it fails to fill the gap in the EU environmental policy that remains focused on land.

It could also turn out to be difficult to reach agreement at Council of Ministers level given that there are divergent views on the level of ambition of the directive, including deciding on whether the GES has to be reached by 2021 or whether it is only progress towards this end that must be manifested.

In the last Environment Council meeting in October, the majority of the delegations agreed that the directive should include an explicit definition of the concept of GES but requested some flexibility with regard to the timetable. Many countries also stressed the need to ensure coherence between the different levels of the regulation and with other EC laws and policies as well as the need to recognise the specific situation of the landlocked countries. The European Parliament gave its first reading opinion last month, welcoming the proposal but suggesting a number of amendments to strengthen it. It deems the proposal neither stringent nor clear enough to be genuinely operational especially if it is to form one of the pillars of the European maritime policy.

(More information is available from Forum Malta fl-Ewropa, telephone 2590 9101 or e-mail foruminfo@gov.mt.)

Mr Mizzi is research analyst at Forum Malta Fl-Ewropa.