Over three years after an election campaign the centrepiece of which was the Prime Minister’s declared resolution that he would successfully reduce the “environmental deficit”, the government launched an ambitious draft National Environment Policy. This declares that “by 2020” there will be “…increased appreciation of Malta’s natural and cultural environment and a strong sense of pride in Malta’s environment”.
Even allowing for the fact that the very effective Parliamentary Secretary for Tourism, the Environment and Culture has had to put in place a wide-ranging restructuring of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority and will shortly be piloting the Sustainable Development Bill through Parliament, one has to question the timing of this policy document and, indeed, its efficacy as a planning tool. The suspicion that this is no more than a statement of intent of what the government would like to do over the next few years in order to head off any criticism in the run-up to the next election that it has been sitting on its hands for the last 40 months cannot be far from readers’ minds as they study the document.
The National Environment Policy is, like the curate’s egg, good in parts. It attempts to bring together in a comprehensive manner every aspect that affects our environment and quality of life. To that important extent, therefore, it provides a necessary checklist of where we stand and the huge challenges that still lie ahead. The policy document tackles the yawning gaps that exist in the environmental and cultural heritage fields by setting in train commitments to find solutions to these manifold deficiencies by specific dates.
The unsatisfactory aspect of this is that it only serves to expose the irresponsible attitude that successive governments adopted towards the environment. The fact that the present Administration belongs to the party that has been in government for almost the past 25 years makes it particularly sensitive to the charge of inaction. Does this National Environment Policy help to allay that concern or does it simply underline it?
The document has already been dismissed as an exercise in political rhetoric. While this is true to an extent, it is to dismiss the document too flippantly. Such attitude presumes that because the actions required to find solutions to these deep-seated environmental challenges will fail in most major respects after the next election, they will never be really tackled or will not be completed. This may well be so and our cynical experience of politicians tends to reinforce this view.
But there is a more positive approach that should be adopted. This is to recognise in a bipartisan manner that the National Environment Policy exposes the majority of environmental and heritage issues that need to be addressed (although nowhere was the continuing scar on the environment of widespread littering satisfactorily dealt with) and to seek ways of implementing solutions more quickly than the snail’s pace this document has proposed.
To take but one example, how can any responsible government wait until 2014 to introduce legislation to deal with a range of environmental disasters, such as a major oil spill? The speed at which many of the solutions are to be found is a direct reflection of political will as well as the allocation of resources. The major failure of this document is that it exposes a lack of real political determination to tackle this crucial area of policy. This needs urgently to be addressed if the document is to have any lasting credibility.