A holistic plan, a clear roadmap, time frames and benchmarks were required to meet the country’s environmental aims, the Labour Party has said.
Labour environment spokesman Leo Brincat said yesterday the time for rhetoric was over but the Nationalist Party said his position was a sign of Labour leader Joseph Muscat’s “environmental insensitivity”, given that Mr Brincat had committed “huge obscenities” in the field when he was parliamentary secretary.
Mr Brincat was around when the worst environmental scandals and irreparable damage were carried out, the PN said.
Mr Brincat added that among the targets for sustainable development and climate change the government had set but never met was the document on the national environmental policy, which had not yet been issued for consultation even though it was meant to at the end of last month.
The document on the adaptation for climate change, which should have been ready by the beginning of summer, had also not yet been finalised, Mr Brincat pointed out. So was the experts’ document on Eco Gozo being kept a secret, he said.
Even the law on sustainable development that had to be approved by Parliament by the first half of the year had not yet been discussed. While the strategy for the mitigation of climate change had been approved in October 2009, the government had given no account of the number of measures that had been implemented.
Mr Brincat pointed out that the Delimara power station extension did not have the required permit, yet the government said that its first phase would start operating next year. As for the Sikka l-Bajda wind farm, the government was taking it for granted that the project was viable when environmental studies had not been completed.
The parliamentary committee for black dust had only met once and the planning authority had not carried out any conclusive studies, Mr Brincat said.
The country had no clear strategy on the generation of green jobs despite the fact that various working groups were set up, while the Malta Resources Authority had hardly used EU funds allocated to promote alternative energy.
The promised landfill for hazardous waste remained unfulfilled, said Mr Brincat, insisting that the country needed much more than flowers in roundabouts to prove it was taking the environment seriously.
The PN said that if it were up to Dr Muscat, Malta would not have tapped into EU funds for the modernisation of the Sant’Antnin waste recycling plant. The PL had tried to scare farmers about wind farms. Ther PN listed among its environmental achievements the many public open spaces, the clean waters, initiatives for alternative energy and emissions reductions for better-quality air.