A watchdog called MEA

One of the biggest gifts Malta may deserve for 2010 is MEA. But we will surely not get it, not for the New Year, at least. In fact, most of us may not even be ready to accept such a gift. Why? Read on.

Recently, I was invited to participate in a public forum organised by the Malta Rambler's Association and other environmental NGOs. The following are the major points made in my contribution to this forum.

By far, almost all of the environmental public discussions are dominated by issues of planning rather than by the core substance of how we should protect and manage properly our environmental resources. It seems that the only place where environmental matters take precidence over planning is in the title of Mepa!

Admittedly, planning issues have a direct impact on the quality of our environment and in a small island state like Malta, where environmental resources such as land availability are in such a short supply, issues such as permits to build in ODZ soon reach the white-hot stage of national controversy. This is because most of us percieve such cases as being a type of daytime robbery of a resource that should be owned by the commons rather than by some individual, however well connected s/he may be. Such planning issues are often highly emotive in nature and, in a warm climate society as ours, emotions run galore! However, we should also be aware that other environmental issues, which in themselves may be much less emotive, may be much less evident by their very nature... but, possibly, more important in the long run.

In my view, all discussions on environmental issues should be guided by the general principles of how to ensure basic sustainable development of our resources and better protection of the so-called "life-systems", which support our own quality of life and that of other species sharing the same environmental resources.

Furthermore, such discussions should assist our policy makers to take the right decisions on behalf of the general good, not only on issues directly related to the environment and planning but also on others that determine our economic and social development. In doing so, we must realise that such decisions need to be based on factual, technical and scientific information on the state of our environment.

I beleive that, in many cases, such information is either very limited or indeed completely lacking.

Very often, therefore, we act myoptically like that person who decides what to do about his health on the basis of misinformed folk medicine rather than on a proper health check-up.

This techical monitoring information about the state of health of our environment is missing beacuse of a number of reasons, which include:

(a) Getting such information requires money and resources and these are always in short supply, especially where it counts.

(b) We tend to be attracted towards frills more than what is substansive in environmental protection.

(c) We tend to prefer tackling the superficial symptoms rather than to discover the roots of our problems and deal with them head-on.

(d) In general, there is a low level of respect towards the value of scientific information and on its indispensability for proper environmental management.

(e) This itself is the result of a low level of scientific and ecological literacy of our society at large.

All these conditions and circumstances have led to the prevailing situation, where Mepa, which should be our national watchdog on environmental protection and good management, has been turned into an old toothless dog often receiving merciless battering from all directions, including from the authorities, the public at large, NGOs and also from environmental speculators. And let us all be aware, this state of affairs mostly satisfies the hidden agendy of the latter!

In its rundown state, Mepa is simply unable to fulfil its basic role of acting as the national regulator of the state of the environment and to take managerial decisions based on technical and timely information. I can refer to several examples to justify this statement:

(a) The years-long controversy of what is the source emitting the black dust covering localities like Fgura. This has now turned into a ridiculous saga illustrating the lack of basic scientific information.

(b) The inability to conclude a national monitoring programme of sound levels and, therefore, to identify "hot spots" within national and strategic noise maps, as required by the EU Environmental Noise Directive.

(c) The lack of monitoring of the quality of our surface waters again as required by the relevant EU directive.

(d) The very limited information on the type of risks our marine protected areas are facing, and, therefore, our inability to protect them from such risks!

(e) Very limited and, at times, inexistent environmental inspections as required by law.

Therefore, it should not come as a suprise to any of us if Malta is fast becoming the "bad boy in class" of the EU in matters related to environmental cases of infringement procedures. For the year 2007, Malta had twice the number of infringement cases than those for Poland (which was formerly regarded by some as one of the "environmentally-dirtiest" eastern states), three times those for Cyprus (our neighbour in the Mediterranean) and four times those for Hungary.

In these circumstances, any hint at Mepa becoming "self-funding" as an entity is ridicolous and dangerous. The protection and good management of the environment should be considered as one of the basic "social services" to be secured for our citizens.

If one looks at the broad historic perspective of environmental management and protection in Malta, it becomes evident that, through successive phases of organisational developments, which happened in response to perceived needs often of a sectoral nature, the end result was that the environment progressively became the remit of a myriad of entities and authorities under the auspices of different ministries (especially as a result of the recent Mepa reform). This is certainly not a healthy prospect and does not augur well for a holistic, strong and effective response for our national needs in environment management and protection.

What we need is a national watchdog called MEA: the Malta Environment Authority. This should be able to act as a strong regulatory body in environmental matters, with all the required resources, including a well-trained and motivated staff. And, as a national watchdog, it should be able to act independently of all other government entities and authorities. Our MEA should play second fiddle to none.

Prof. Axiak is chairman of the Church Environment Commission.