The draft National Environment Policy presents us with an overwhelming scenario for Malta in 2020.

“By 2020, the Maltese environment will be providing an improved quality of life, which will result in improved well-being, increased appreciation of Malta’s natural and cultural environment and a strong sense of pride in Malta’s environment. Malta will have effectively addressed its environmental problems, implementing its national, EU and international responsibilities and achieving economic prosperity and well-being for its people in a sustainable and environmentally-responsible manner. Malta will be well on its way to implementing its long-term vision of transforming itself into a low-carbon, zero-waste society by 2050” (NEP, page 15).

This discourse is Malta’s green dream. Will it come into fruition?

The NEP has as its ultimate goal to ensure a high level of environmental quality in the Maltese islands. There have already been efforts in this direction but with 2020 less than 10 years away Malta still remains bottom of the list in terms of its share of renewable energy consumption and, together with Latvia and Bulgaria, we rank among the top three in terms of the amount of waste that ultimately goes to landfill.

It is not bleak on all fronts. A recent publication by the European Environment Agency on the state and outlook of the European environment in 2010 gives Malta’s greenhouse gas emissions per capita as one of the lowest in the EU.

Worth mentioning is Malta’s water exploitation index, the annual water abstraction as a percentage of available long-term freshwater resources, which clearly sends a very worrying signal.

What impresses me most about the recently-published technical report on black dust is not the black dust issue per se. The risks we face as a result of our exposure to fine white dust from construction industry activities, both in soft stone quarries and elsewhere in urban areas, are perhaps as serious, if not more, as the ones the inner harbour residents have been living with since the Marsa power station came into existence.

Fine dust emission from soft stone quarries is estimated at 38 times the highest recommended level and described as if each and every one of us is exposed to roughly a two-litre bottle full of fine, white dust annually.

What measures are in place and what more could be done to address this particular issue, perhaps a thorny one indeed, and what are the costs incurred in doing so versus doing nothing at all?

It is through the economy that the green dream becomes a reality. The environment and the economy are two parts of the same whole: an economy is sustained by the environmental resources on which it thrives. No economy is sustainable if it consumes a disproportionate amount of resources, which it ultimately converts into wastes that are, basically, resources in their own right but for which no useful purpose has yet been identified. Economists brand the accumulation of wastes or, rather, unwanted resources and the harmful impact they cause on the environment as market failure. As Lord Stern puts it, global climate change is unravelling itself as the biggest market failure in human history.

Addressing the Lib Dem autumn conference in Birmingham, British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne proudly championed measures to encourage British consumers to shop around for the most competitive utility rates.

The Tory’s quick-fire response is that their strange government bedfellows’ obsession with promoting green energy was actually serving only to inflate energy prices.

While Australian Premier Julia Gillard is putting her political life on the line by advocating a carbon tax, the Nordic countries have had a sulphur tax and a nitrogen tariff already for many years.

The name of the game with Malta’s draft NEP is one of prudent words that describe the way forward as a “stepped approach” towards environmental taxation. A Eurostat report on environmental taxes in Europe ranks Denmark as having the highest level of environmental taxation for 2007 in the EU at 5.9 per cent of its GDP. Spain and Lithuania are at the lower end at slightly below two per cent of their respective GDPs while the Netherlands, Malta, Bulgaria and Cyprus are somewhere in between at about three or four per cent. Malta’s environmental tax regime may already be respectable enough, after all.

What is surely needed is policy that stimulates the environmental goods and services industry. While setting a target for the local green job sector to grow by 50 per cent by 2015, the draft NEP calls for a Green Jobs Strategy. Genuine synergistic action of all stakeholders in the economy will be needed to have such a strategy hopefully implemented.

In the end, the honourable ladies and gentlemen at the helm will undoubtedly look beyond their visions and calculate that a low-carbon, zero-waste society by 2050 also comes at a price. With or without a global recession, the country will only green itself as much as it can afford.

sapulis@gmail.com

The author specialises in</p><p>environmental management.

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