EU Environmental Policy

Its journey to centre stage

Nigel Haigh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138890312
• eBook ISBN: 9781317495048
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

At a time when Europeans across the continent are focused on the EU's future direction, this book provides an important contribution to the current debate. Created for reasons quite unconnected with the environment, the EU has been given a compelling new justification by the success of its environmental policy. A number of factors – including a number of threats that came to prominence in the 1980s, and the new concept of 'sustainable development' – are responsible for pushing environmental policy to the forefront of its agenda.

Nigel Haigh, a leading authority on the development and implementation of EU environmental policy, traces its evolution from obscurity to centrality. Drawing on a range of articles and lectures, he demonstrates how the EU has not only adapted itself to take on entirely new subject matter, but also has contributed to solving problems which individual Member States could not have dealt with on their own. The book goes on to contextualise the issues throughout its history and offers insight into the future role of the EU in environmental matters.

This book is a valuable resource for academics and scholars as well as professionals and policy makers in the areas of environment and sustainability, politics, international relations and European affairs.

1

Seeing EU environmental policy

Productive beginnings questioned

The EU had been building an environmental policy for some fifteen years when Jacques Delors began his second term as President of the European Commission in 1989. Long before the EU became involved, several separate strands of what we now call environmental policy had existed in the EU Member States – air and water quality, waste management, nature protection, and land-use planning – subjects that were often handled at a local level with little central government involvement. It was only when the interconnectedness of environmental threats became better understood that some countries began forming specialised ministries in the early 1970s to strengthen and bring these strands together. With the benefit of this experience as well as that of the USA, and inspired by the great UN Conference on the Human Environment of 1972, the EU started to adopt legislation that transmitted to the weaker States some of the policies of the stronger. It was a collaborative process in which EU legislation (mainly Directives, but also Regulations and Decisions) were agreed unanimously by national Ministers who found themselves learning from each other while having to accept compromises. But when it came to dealing with newly emerging topics – reducing acid rain, testing new chemicals, protecting the ozone layer – the legislation the EU introduced was original in all the Member States. Despite the time it took to resolve sharp conflicts over acid rain, it is hard to imagine these three topics being handled as efficiently without the EU’s involvement. However productive these beginnings might have seemed, they did not prevent Delors from voicing doubts as he allocated portfolios to his fellow Commissioners. He is said to have told Carlo Ripa di Meana as he asked him to take responsibility for the environment ‘I want you to give me an environmental policy. I cannot see an environmental policy. All I can see is a list of Directives.’

Whether Ripa, four years later in any parting interview he may have had with Delors, was able to give an account of how he had risen to the challenge is not recorded, but he could certainly have made an attempt. Delors would have appreciated being reminded that all the Member States had taken a symbolically important step on climate change by agreeing a collective cap on emissions of greenhouse gases – with considerable implications for future energy policies – and that without that step the EU could not have taken the lead in the adoption of a global convention by so many countries, including a reluctant USA. While Ripa was an enthusiastic promoter of action on climate change, he happened to be in post at the very time that policy-makers were confronted with that most threatening of all environmental issues. Delors would certainly have taken satisfaction from European influence being projected globally with the result that people outside Europe began to see that the EU had an important new policy.

Ripa could have gone on to remind Delors how he had raised the visibility of a conflict over polluting motor cars. In order to ensure that small as well as large cars were fitted with catalytic converters, Ripa had taken advantage of the complicated procedures for adopting legislation introduced in 1987 by the treaty known as the Single European Act. That treaty is best known for setting a deadline for the completion of the EU ‘internal market’ – previously called the ‘common market’ and now usually referred to as the ‘single market’.¹ But it also altered the balance of power between the three EU institutions that together form the EU legislature: the Council (composed of national Ministers); the Commission (which has the power of initiative, so is much more than a civil service); and the elected European Parliament. The Act had not only removed the need for unanimity among national Ministers when the Council adopted legislation relating to the single market (by introducing ‘qualified majority voting’ which made it impossible for just a few Member States to block a decision), but it had also given the Parliament more power over the outcome. Ripa had persuaded the Commission to drop its previous position in favour of the more stringent emission standards voted for by the Parliament.² Since the Council could not agree unanimously to overturn the Parliament’s standards, as the new rules allowed it to do, the outcome sent shock waves through the manufacturers of small cars who had complacently assumed that this technology would not be required of them. A new Directive was thus added to the list, but with this difference: manufacturers in an important economic sector found that they could no longer rely on complicit national governments to defend their short-term interests. The EU had very publicly dragged a few reluctant Member States into accepting the higher environmental standards sought by a majority, an outcome that we all – including the car manufacturers – now simply take for granted.

An original Action Programme

While Delors might have been persuaded that new Directives were reaching into important new areas, he could still have questioned whether environmental policy had become more coherent. To answer this more difficult question, Ripa could have explained how the Fifth Environmental Action Programme, which he introduced in 1992, differed from its predecessors.

An Action Programme is the obvious place for presenting an overall view. The first had been called for by the Heads of State and Government in 1972 when they first declared that the EU should have an environmental policy. Subsequent programmes had all taken a similar form: while discussing principles and emerging ideas their main purpose was to outline what new legislation might be brought forward in the years ahead in the separate fields of water, air, waste, nature protection and so on. They were often long and detailed, and accordingly read only by enthusiasts. The lacklustre character of similar programmes in the Netherlands – also divided along bureaucratic demarcation lines – struck Pieter Winsemius when he became Dutch Environment Minister. Drawing on his experience at the management consultancy McKinsey, he suggested something different. He argued that while the earlier programmes might have attracted the attention of specialists, they would never have been read by the Chief Executives or the Boards of companies that generated the problems that the programmes were intended to tackle. He proposed instead that a new Dutch work programme should start by identifying the most environmentally damaging activities – oil refineries, road transport and intensive pig farms, for example – and then say what the Ministry was going to do about them. That, he said, would get their attention.

The Dutch approach had of course to be modified to suit the greater geographical extent of the EU. Instead of identifying discrete problems, the EU’s Fifth Action Programme selected five Europe-wide ‘target sectors’ for attention: industry, transport, agriculture, energy and tourism. The Single European Act had provided the authority for this by stating that ‘environmental protection requirements shall be a component of the Community’s other policies’. For the first time the Directorates-General of the Commission responsible for these target sectors were on notice that they were likely to face interference. While EU environmental legislation had often caused trouble within the Member States by involving significant costs as well as changes to established rules and procedures, they had made little impact on the other parts of the Commission. These other Directorates-General (DGs) had previously been able to ignore environmental concerns, but were now forced to confront them, as, by extension, were national policy-makers responsible for EU policies in those target sectors too. Anyone with experience of bureaucracies will know quite what that entails. It was an innovation not without risks. If the new Dutch programme woke up Chief Executives, the new EU programme was to wake up other parts of the Commission who might now turn round and bite back.

To make the point that the Fifth Programme was different, it was called ‘Towards Sustainability’. This derived from the 1987 report of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission 1987) that had given currency to the concept of ‘sustainable development’. The title was intended to convey that EU environmental policy was no longer to be regarded as a self-contained marginal subject; it was now setting its sights on shifting the very core task of the EU. The founding Treaty of Rome had stated this as promoting ‘a harmonious development of economic activities’, and ‘a continuous and balanced expansion’ without any suggestion that environmental constraints might limit such expansion. The questioning of the idea that conventional economic growth could be continuous in a finite world of finite resources had seriously begun only in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Brundtland report, reflecting these new ideas, had put forward a form of words that was widely accepted. Development, Brundtland had said, must not be allowed to compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. From then on it became commonplace to distinguish ‘sustainable development’ from ‘economic development’ by saying that it was a broader concept supported on three ‘pillars’ (economic, social and environmental), although this formulation failed to emphasise the tough part of Brundtland’s message about future generations. When the Maastricht Treaty entered into force in 1993, the EU’s task was accordingly altered to include a reference to sustainable development, although expressed in a rather opaque way for reasons explained in Chapter 3. Clearer wording came with the Amsterdam and Lisbon Treaties of 1997 and 2007, the Amsterdam Treaty stating unambiguously that ‘Environmental requirements must be integrated into the definition and implementation of Community policies and activities in particular with a view to promoting sustainable development.’

Delors himself had suggested another way of making EU policy more visible when, in 1989, he called for ‘a European system of environmental measurement and verification which could be the precursor of a European environment agency’. Such an Agency began work in 1994 in Copenhagen, more or less at arm’s length from the Commission in Brussels, to provide reliable Europe-wide information as a basis for environmental measures.

Strategies proliferate

By 1993, when Ripa ended his term of office, EU environmental policy was looking quite different from when he started, at least to those in EU policy-making circles. Over the next few years it was to continue to change in such a way that Delors might well have said that he could now see a list of strategies, and not just a list of Directives.

When the ink on the Amsterdam Treaty was hardly dry and before it was ratified, the Swedish Prime Minister in 1997 proposed that there be an EU sustainable development strategy, and this was eventually adopted under the Swedish Presidency in 2001 in time for the UN conference on sustainable development in Johannesburg. A Sixth Environmental Action Programme, adopted the next year, was said to provide the environmental ‘pillar’ of the sustainable development strategy. A series of ‘integration strategies’ then appeared between 1998 and 2002, each dealing with the subjects of the various specialist Councils – agriculture, energy, transport and so on. This was called the ‘Cardiff process’ after the Council meeting where it was launched.

The question then arose as to how these various strategies related to the ‘overall strategy’ for economic and social renewal known as the ‘Lisbon Strategy’ that was agreed in 2000. This sought to make Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ – wording that conspicuously ignored the environment, depending on the meaning given to ‘sustainable growth’. The 2001 sustainable development strategy was said by the Commission to add an environmental dimension to the Lisbon Strategy but as it came later the opportunity was missed to integrate the three ‘pillars’ – environmental, social and economic – into the first attempt at an all-embracing EU strategy. Partly to overcome this, the Commission began producing a list of ‘structural indicators’ – over forty at one point – to measure progress with the Lisbon Strategy, and in 2001 seven related to the environment.³ The total number of indicators was later reduced to a shortlist of fourteen, of which three were environmental: greenhouse gases, energy intensity, and volume of transport. When the Lisbon Strategy was relaunched in 2005, environmental and social considerations were sidelined in favour of a concentration on industrial competitiveness. The Commission then engaged in some wishful thinking when, rather ingeniously, it said that the two strategies (Lisbon and sustainable development) were different but ‘mutually reinforcing strategies aimed at the same goal, but producing their results in different time frames’.

The Lisbon Strategy was superseded in 2010 by the ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’ whose short-term priority is, not surprisingly, to secure an exit from the economic and financial problems that followed the global financial crisis of 2007/08. In the longer term the 2020 Strategy aims to turn the EU into an economy that is smart (based on knowledge and innovation); sustainable (promoting resource-efficient, greener and more competitive growth); and inclusive (high employment, delivering economic, social and territorial cohesion). All these high-level strategies and indicators have had the merit that environmental issues were continuously brought to the attention of the Heads of State and Government at their periodic meetings. Meanwhile new legislation covering the traditional areas of environmental policy, such as those set out in the ‘thematic strategies’ established by the Sixth Action Programme, have continued, though at a slower pace and often involving refinement of earlier legislation. A subject emphasised in the Seventh Action Programme of 2013 is resource efficiency which is stimulating more discussion of a ‘circular economy’ (see Chapter 6).

Real world events shift opinion

While there is no doubt that Ripa had done much to move EU environmental policy from self-contained obscurity to being of central importance, several events before his term had begun shifting the views of the public and politicians. Climate change had been placed on the political agenda in 1985 by a world scientific conference prompting the Parliament the next year to call for an EU policy on the subject – the first EU institution to do so (see Chapter 9). When the nuclear power station at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded in 1986, sending a cloud of radioactive particles over large parts of Europe, it brought home the message, more immediately than climate change, that pollution knows no frontiers. (The EU promptly introduced safety standards for radioactivity in foodstuffs to prevent differing national standards disrupting trade.) Protection of the ozone layer was another new subject. The hypothesis that it was being depleted by certain synthetic chemicals known as CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), allowing dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth’s surface, had been put forward in the 1970s – later to earn its authors a Nobel prize – but in 1987 an international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol required countries to cut production of CFCs as a precautionary measure. No sooner was the Montreal Protocol signed than a scientific consensus developed that CFCs were indeed the cause of the ‘hole in the ozone layer’, so the ban on CFC production that followed no longer had to be justified as precautionary (see Chapter 13). Suddenly the public became aware that the use of familiar domestic products containing CFCs – hairsprays and refrigerators – had the capacity to threaten the planet. In 1988 the EU finally adopted a Directive to combat acid rain. For many years this had been a concern of Scandinavian countries – which saw themselves as victims of sulphur dioxide blowing mainly from the UK, Germany and Poland. The Directive required the Member States to cut emissions (see Chapter 4). Three of these manmade phenomena – acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change – each drew a response that moved EU environmental policy onto a higher plane (see Chapter 11).

A date to mark the transition – 1987

If a symbolic event is needed to mark the beginning of this transition from obscurity to centrality, then the Single European Act that came into force in 1987 best provides it: it formally made environmental protection a component of other EU policies. But no treaty on its own would have led EU environment policy to be taken more seriously by the uncommitted. Nor would an Action Programme, however novel. A necessary ingredient was public concern, and that was strongly reinforced by the four environmental phenomena described above. All four convincingly demonstrated that some problems cannot be handled by individual countries acting alone, and the EU, having been created for reasons quite unconnected with the environment, now found it had a compelling new justification. That the public throughout Europe believed that the EU should have a strong environmental policy partly explains the astonishing success of Green Parties in the 1989 elections for the European Parliament.

Increasing public awareness had also been the objective of the 1987 campaign called ‘European Year of the Environment’, which was an initiative of Ripa’s predecessor, Stanley Clinton Davis. He would never have persuaded his fellow Commissioners to agree to it if they were not sympathetic to the idea that the EU should be paying greater attention to a subject that so concerned the public.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, 1987 was also the year of the Brundtland report which, as we have seen, gave currency to a worldview-changing concept that influenced subsequent EU treaties (see Chapter 3). For all these reasons, the year 1987 is the best symbolic date for the beginning of the transition period. A date for its end is more difficult to select since a central role for environmental policy always has to be fought for, and is always at risk of being undermined by other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Note on use of the term ‘EU’
• Acknowledgement
• Previously Published Material
• 1. Seeing EU environmental policy
• 2. Cooperating with Other Countries
• 3. Sustainable Development in the EU Treaties
• 4. Air and acid rain
• 5. Water – towards catchment management
• 6. From waste to resources
• 7. Chemicals – the Cinderella of environmental policy
• 8. Integrating pollution control
• 9. Climate change
• 10. Science and policy
• 11. Cooperating with Other Countries
• 12. Allocating tasks – subsidiarity
• 13. The precautionary principle
• 14. Making the legislation work
• 15. Retaining the centre stage
• Appendix
• EU legislation mentioned in the text
• International Conventions and their Protocols mentioned in the text
• Index