EU unveils strategy to protect marine environment

The European Commission has unveiled a €70 million per year strategy to protect Europe’s marine environment.

The ‘thematic strategy on the protection and the conservation of the marine environment’ aims to ensure that all EU marine waters are environmentally healthy by 2021.

Stavros Dimas said that his marine strategy would serve as “the environmental pillar” of the commission’s future EU maritime policy due to be unveiled in 2006.

“For the first time the EU is putting in place a policy framework which specifically addresses the vital issue of protecting Europe’s seas and oceans,” said the environment commissioner, adding that the “the stakes are high.”

Dimas said that the damage to Europe’s marine environment was potentially irreversible, and could jeopardise key EU wealth and employment sectors including the tourism and fisheries industries.

“Europe’s seas and oceans make a huge contribution to our quality of life and our economic prosperity, but they are deteriorating because of over-exploitation, pollution, climate change and a range of other factors,” said Dimas.

“We want to ensure that European citizens today and in the future are able to benefit from seas and oceans that are safe, clean, healthy and rich in nature.”

The EU’s current sector by sector approach to environmental protection of the seas is too fractured suggested Dimas who wants a more harmonised approach based around member states grouped into ‘marine regions’ such as the Baltic , the North East Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

The strategy will take the form of an EU directive which will advise on guidelines and deadlines for developing strategies for each member states in a ‘marine region’.

Each member state will be obliged to assess the state of their surrounding seas, and devise a programme of measures including impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses to measure and improve their marine environments.

Each country will then produce a marine strategy, including a series of environmental targets, for their own waters in cooperation with other countries in their marine region and to come to an agreement on a so called “good environmental status” for their surrounding waters.

However, how strong these national environmental targets will be and what constitutes a “good environmental status” have yet to be defined.

“In order to guide this process and ensure coherent implementation, the commission will define, after consultation of all interested parties, criteria and standards for the recognition of “good environmental status,” said the commission in an explanatory report.

Environmental groups highlighted what they see as a lack of “binding commitment to protect Europe’s seas.”

“Today’s proposal was expected to fill a gap in EU environmental policy,” said a coalition of environmental NGOs.

“The commission’s text falls short. It is now up to the European Parliament and Council to set legally binding objectives within this directive, including a clear definition of what constitutes a healthy sea,” said the NGO group.

But Dimas defended the cooperative method of his second of seven thematic environmental strategies, saying that the commission had to take account of regional differences within Europe’s marine regions.

“This is an area where there is a strong need for a European overarching and integrated approach,” said Dimas.

The new marine environment strategy will cost around €90 million to implement over two years and €70 million each year to maintain.

Benefits are as yet uncosted, but the effects of taking no action to improve the marine environment would be high suggest the commission.

The estimated cost of the Prestige oil spill disaster to European fishing and tourism was around €5 billion.

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