Running scared of a sustainability plan

I was grateful for Michael Refalo's most courteous and careful six-part explanation of the hotel moratorium saga. It was, if I may say so, a somewhat self-satisfied tour de force which provided an excellent, if condescending, analysis of why we are where we are.

But Dr Refalo failed to address the central tenet of my Talking Point of June 9 entitled "Impose a moratorium on major new tourism developments". This was that a temporary suspension - a moratorium - should be placed on new tourism development applications until we can see more clearly, in the context of a legally binding national plan for sustainable development, where the balance of advantage in economic, social and environmental terms lies.

Din l-Art Helwa has no problem with old hotels being improved - on the contrary, like Dr Refalo, we welcome this - provided that bed stock numbers remain at broadly current levels.

The centre-piece of Din l-Art Helwa's argument is the urgent need for a properly considered national plan for sustainable development. We called last year for a national strategic plan on the environment when we highlighted the country's endemic problem of the sharp contrast between private affluence and the public squalor all around us.

Soon afterwards, 17 months ago, the National Commission for Sustainable Development was set up under the chairmanship of the prime minister. The national commission has so far produced little of substance. It last met over six months ago. It has still not been reconstituted since the general election.

We must implement an overriding national plan for sustainable development, a legally binding national strategic plan that imposes stability on our land use, including, inter alia, on new tourism developments.

The need for any new construction developments must be tightly defined by transparent sustainability targets firmly embedded in a new structure plan. Approved development applications should be reduced by setting annual threshold figures - for example, for housing, hotel beds, restaurants, bars and so on - in the number that may be granted in each local plan area.

To have the minister of tourism - or the former minister of tourism for that matter - make ex-cathedra pronouncements about what he considers the right level of bed numbers without taking into consideration their impact on the future sustainability of this country through a well considered national plan for sustainable development is to perpetuate the land use and environmental and infrastructural errors of the last few decades.

Why do we seem to run scared of a proper sustainability plan? We seem to have a cultural aversion to forward planning, with set targets and time-scales for achieving them. It is our country and our quality of life which are at stake here. The least we can do is to plan carefully for its future sustainability.

According to the European Union's Environment Commissioner we are obliged to resolve the main issue, as she sees it, "of making economic and social development compatible with environmental protection - the challenge of sustainability" - before next May. The key challenge, she says, "is of the integration of the environment into all other policies, particularly development of tourism and land use planning".

If for no other reason, conforming to European Union discipline in meeting the terms of the acquis requires us to have a national sustainability plan. The sooner we get on with it, the better. But until we have a strategic plan in place, common sense dictates that there should be a pause and new hotel or tourism developments should only be permitted if they replace old bed stock.

To do otherwise at this critical juncture is to risk people saying in 10 years' time: "Poor Malta. Once ranked among the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, it sold its soul to mass tourism and now stands ruined by tacky over-development".

Mr Scicluna is executive president, Din l-Art Helwa