'Ambitious' environmental policy within 18 months

A national environmental policy will be drawn up over the next 18 months to have a holistic framework enabling Malta to go a step further than just adopting EU directives.

"The EU sets good benchmarks but our policy should be more ambitious than simply reaching them. We want to help set the agenda of the EU in terms of the environment and not just be dictated to," the Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Mario de Marco said yesterday.

The country's environmental policies are scattered in various separate policies on issues such as air quality, biodiversity and land use. "We want to achieve realistic deliverables for the Maltese... a plan whereby the environment drives sectors like development, rather than the other way around," he said.

Dr de Marco pointed out that most of Malta's environmental policy was EU-driven through about 200 directives, imposing some 2,000 obligations.

He warned that the new policy would take between 12 and 18 months to conclude but some deliverables would be achievable beforehand.

In the process of drawing up the environmental policy, the government hopes to identify which of the directives are not in harmony with each other. It will also flag areas of improvement by identifying the specific needs of Malta and other countries in the region.

The policy would also involve data collection to understand the state of the environment and fill in the information gaps that exist.

Dr de Marco said there were various opportunities to be had by synergising environment policy with that of other areas such as tourism, health and waste management. "It's not just about using the environment to help tourism, for example. We also need to find ways of making tourism contribute to the environment," he said.

Dr de Marco's office has recently launched a Bill as part of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority reform in which all the scattered development and environment laws were streamlined into one Act. The Bill still has to be approved by Parliament.

Dr de Marco announced that the government had approved Mepa's request to recruit 45 new employees in its environment protection directorate. This, he said, was intended to quell criticism that Mepa's enforcement arm did not have enough resources to keep up with its work.