04th June 2002

FoE Calls for National Agenda on Two Environmental Issues

On the occasion of World Environment Day 2002, Moviment ghall-Ambjent, Friends of the Earth (Malta) welcomes the increased interest of political parties, the public and the media in environmental affairs during the past year and calls on the authorities to reflect that interest in their decisions.

FoE (Malta) would like to see the problems of vacant dwellings and transport tackled on a national level. A participatory process should be initiated to improve our land use problems and to take action to improve our transport situation.

Civil society should take on its responsibilities and join with political parties to tackle these issues. Much can be done without the preparation of strategies, but the best way to solve our problems would be to start a participatory process so that national strategies can be drawn up.

FoE Malta welcomes the soon to be published sustainability indicators and hopes that targets will be set to improve Malta’s environmental performance within the coming years.

More importance should be given to the Earth Summit that will be held in Johannesburg in September – our feeling is that Malta is the country that is least aware that the summit is looming.

We encourage the public to send messages calling on world leaders to save the summit by visiting FoE’s website at: http://www.foei.org