EuroMed Partnership committed to sustainable development

Euro-Mediterranean Partnership environment ministers have pledged here to make sustainable development the group's "predominant global and guiding objective".

"Economic and social development and environmental protection have to be fully integrated if we are to meet the needs of today without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," states the Athens Declaration by Euro-Mediterranean Ministers for the Environment, adopted by the second Euro-Mediterranean Ministerial Conference on the Environment.

The Declaration goes beyond the call by the Barcelona V Euromed foreign ministers' conference (Valencia, April 22-23) that "sustainable development should be included among the guiding principles" of the Partnership.

Launched in Barcelona in 1995 and serviced by European Commission, the Partnership has been heavily criticised by Mediterranean civil society organisations, trade unions and parliamentarians for excessive focus on political and economic questions, to the detriment of the region's grave social and environmental problems. These groups have also urged the Partnership to present a formal commitment to sustainability at the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg starting on August 26.

Chairing the meeting, Danish minister Hanns Christian Schmidt stated that "the full support for and dedication to WSSD's goals by our Partnerhsip will be of the utmost importance".

The Declaration launches a framework for a Euro-Mediterranean Strategy for Environmental Integration, a key input to sustainability, operating at both national and regional levels. Existing or future Partnership sectoral strategies/activities on water, industry, energy, transport, agriculture, tourism and information technologies must develop integration strategies based on impact analysis, targets and timetables and regular reports to the EMP foreign ministers.

The European Commission would also present these sectoral activities to the Councils of the bilateral association agreements between EU and nearly all the 12 southern partners.

However, the Declaration endorsed the Barcelona Convention/Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) as the "appropriate context for a regional sustainable development strategy, since this context addresses the Mediterranean as an eco-region". This implies the Partnership's full political support to the Convention parties' mandate of last November to its Mediterranean Commission on Sustainable Development to develop a region-wide sustainability strategy for adoption in 2004. (The Barcelona Convention 1975 to combat marine pollution and its protocols bring together all south and east Mediterranean nations, with France, Italy, Spain and Greece as well as the European Commission.)

After years of bureaucratic wrangles and lack of synergy, the Declaration calls for across-the-board dialogue and co-operation between the Partnership and MAP and its eight Regional Activity Centres (including REMPEC on Manoel Island).

The Declaration further commits the Partnership to promote the sustainability of the proposed Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area on the basis of results of a related Sustainability Impact Assessment to be launched at the end of this year.

Environmental NGOs were formally praised for their contribution to the Partnership, the Declaration clearly foreshadowing a more significant role for them in future policy making. Nature Trust (Malta) was represented at a pre-conference NGO forum as well as at the ministerial conference.

Welcoming the conference outcome, Nature Trust's president Vince Attard told The Sunday Times that "unsustainable development is putting the Mediterranean under heavy pressure - directly degrading the quality of life now and for the future. We urge the Maltese Government to progressively integrate environmental considerations into its policies and support the Athens Declaration both for the sake of the Maltese and of the entire Mediterranean region."

Louis Vella of MEPA, who represented Malta in the absence of Parliamentary Secretary George Pullicino, said that the government would conduct such integration mainly through the National Commission for Sustainable Development. "Malta proposed the need to study the environmental impact of fisheries within the agriculture component, but unfortunately this was not accepted," he added.