As defined by the Environment Resources Authority, its role is to “safeguard the environment to achieve a sustainable quality of life”.
This information is enough to draw certain conclusions. By its very name, ERA considers the environment as a store of resources. Its actions show it to be an organisation whose main objective is to line up resources for exploitation. It then proceeds to reassure us that it “shall protect the environment”.
This is a disingenuous statement as it clearly does not have the will or the power to live up to its own mission statement.
Last month’s article in Times of Malta by the ERA’s CEO, Michelle Piccinino, was interesting, providing further insight into how ERA sees its role and duty to society. Taking the Dingli trees incident as an example, the CEO explains that the trees were located within a development zone on which a road had already been approved in the late 1980s. She concludes that “it was clear that ERA could only intervene within its legal remit”.
The 1980s was a period of environmental ignorance. The planet is today in a declared state of environmental emergency and ERA is still using standards that are 40 years old.
The article also celebrates ERA’s efforts to promote green infrastructure in the shape of green walls and landscaping. Potted plants fitted on plastic and concrete-backed walls are not green. The kilometres of what look like rubble walls are in fact stone cladding on reinforced concrete. These walls do not sustain any biodiversity, in direct contrast to the traditional rubble walls that are teeming with life.
The landscaping in centre strips and roundabouts is a net carbon emitter for reasons that ERA would be aware of if the environment, and not greenwashing, were its priority.
In conclusion, the article blames the public for not contributing sufficiently to the consultation process on the landscaping, trees and woodland guidelines and strategy.
In other words, ERA’s impotence is the public’s fault.
In a way this is true. We can hardly expect a different outcome if Maltese society continues to elect representatives who see the environment as fodder for development. It must therefore be conceded that this is also the view of the vast majority of the electorate.
In the meantime, ERA keeps itself busy producing strategies, reports and lists that are then completely disregarded in practice. This is a pitiful state of affairs that is mirrored, to varying degrees, in all other countries.
Change can still happen. It starts with a vision for our islands based on quality and not quantity, within an economic model that seeks balance rather than growth at all costs and that does not overshoot its ecological boundaries. It is paramount to elect representatives of the environment who are committed to the protection and restoration of nature and biodiversity.
Our small and precious Mediterranean archipelago deserves an environmental protection authority managed by persons conversant with environmental, conservation and biodiversity sciences and ecosystem functioning. This EPA would have veto rights over development projects across the board with a mandate to make Malta carbon neutral within 10 years.
The UN, the EU and the US have committed to placing nature at the heart of all decision making. This is not a partisan issue. Parliament should launch a nationwide educational campaign to bring Maltese society out of the ecological dark ages.
Malta’s parliamentarians have a moral obligation, albeit not an electoral commitment, to protect and restore Malta’s life-giving ecosystems for the well-being of people and their planet.