Our environmental policy problem

Julian Kenny
Tuesday, June 29th 2010

’We need to review the approved National Environmental Policy (NEP) integrating its various dimensions to conform to international commitments, including Copenhagen.’

Page 53 Manifesto of the People’s Partnership

Yes Prime Minister, your administration really must review the National Environmental Policy (NEP) and for more than one reason. We all agree that policies are never absolutely fixed and often have to evolve as times and circumstances change. But apart from any technical considerations or initiatives that may emerge in such a review, which incidentally I have to support strongly, there is the reality of the poor quality of the text of the NEP. It should remind you of your days marking undergraduate scripts at UWI in Mona and St Augustine. To cite a few: ’Article 4 of the Constitution’; ’operating at. At the simplest level’; ’That consists nearly totaling scare fossil fuel energies (reduced energy security)’; ’Occupational Health and Safety at Work Act’.

There are two options regarding the NEP, a mandatory requirement of the Environmental Management Act 2000 as laid out in Sections 16(1)(a) and 18 of that Act. The first is to reexamine the relatively recently revised policy and make adjustments where appropriate. The revised NEP, as far as I am aware, was prepared by the EMA and approved by the board before being submitted to the then Ministry of Public Utilities and the Environment, from which it was submitted to Cabinet before being laid officially in Parliament. I purchased a copy of the NEP from the EMA, later obtained one from Parliament. Having studied the document I concluded that no one seems to have proofread the final version, in spite of the fact that this is an official document that will be read widely in international circles. I accordingly prepared an eight-page list of suggested amendments/corrections which I submitted to the minister responsible, with the offer of editing the text (without changing the substance) if it was provided to me on a CD. My offer was not acknowledged. I subsequently made similar submissions to the head of the public service and to then prime minister Manning that were not acknowledged. Months later I received a letter from the permanent secretary of the ministry involved inviting me to submit my comments that had already been submitted three times! The other option is to scrap the revised NEP and start afresh. This should really be done through a national technical workshop open to all interested parties and groups mainly to concentrate on identification and ranking of the core issues before preparation by a small technical group of a draft for consideration by the Ministry of the Environment and Cabinet. Ideally the final approved draft should be circulated for public comment before being finalised for Parliament. Ideally also, the small technical group should comprise persons of demonstrated technical competence with writing and communication skills in the several fields related to environmental issues and not merely paper pushing bureaucrats. This I am sure would all be consistent with the spirit of deeper citizen participation in broad governance as articulated by many in the leadership of the new administration. Should the second option be adopted it will be necessary to examine broad interrelated issues and I suggest that one top priority really must be an evaluation of the existing institutional arrangements for addressing our environmental problems. At the top of the list should be an evaluation of the efficacy of the Environmental Management Authority in meeting the requirements of the EM Act. It is so often stated that the EMA was set up as a consequence of this country signing the Rio UN Convention. This nonsense was repeated on World Environment Day! The EMA was established as a conditionality of a US$100 million World Bank Business Expansion Loan in the early 1990s with the World Bank providing grant funding for its start-up and early staffing. No one seems to note for all the supposed determination to meet the requirements of the UN Convention in the past few years the Manning administration actually deregulated land clearing, mining and quarrying and Mr Manning even went so far in the recent election campaign as to suggest that the EM Act would be modified so as to favour unfettered further industrialisation! The EMA has from its birth been an extremely weak authority, far too close to ministries, often seeming to be acting to please their masters, while behaving as another tree-hugging NGO. It must certainly have been obvious to many where it was headed when the general policy enunciated by the minister initially responsible for it was one of ’voluntary compliance’! We have seen after 15 years water pollution rules that only apply to business and that a grand total of seven pollution permits have been issued by the EMA! -Julian Kenny is a biologist, a former UWI Professor of Zoology and Independent senator Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161707928