27th August 2002

Wrong impression to be given at Johannesburg

The government of Malta will be giving a wrong impression of what has happened in Malta over the past 10 years in Johannesburg, Friends of the Earth (Malta) said today.

The “Malta National Report”, which is to be presented at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, is meant to outline what Malta has done to achieve environmental sustainability over the past ten years.

The main vehicle for improvement following Rio is ‘Agenda 21. The report is full of references to Agenda 21 and even the Prime Minister is quoted as saying: “Agenda 21 has had a positive effect on Malta and has stimulated the Government to update and introduce legislation, to adopt policies and to take action conducive to sustainable development, seeking public participation towards this end.”

Which action? Which polices? Friends of the Earth ask. Where was Agenda 21 applied? Malta has not initiated even one local agenda 21 process and hardly anyone in Malta knows what Agenda 21 is.

In the report certain initiatives are referred to as having been “of relevance” to Agenda 21. This is the authors’ ingenious way of saying that these initiatives are somehow being linked with Agenda 21: with hindsight.

The authors simply looked back at the last ten years for any sort of initiative, conference, meeting in a corridor etc., that had to do with the environment and stuck them into the report as initiatives of relevance to Agenda 21.

That these initiatives had nothing at all to do with Agenda 21 is plain to see to the trained eye and anybody with the slightest knowledge of environmental matters knows this. None of the ‘projects’ – six of which are listed, and of these two were competitions and two conferences, were ever presented as Agenda 21. They could not have been.

One of the most important aspects of Agenda 21 is that is should involve all the various stakeholders and that the process should be an ongoing one.

The truth is that if we look at any of the environmental areas - be it land use, water, air, energy, transport, consumption of resources – we are in a worse situation now that we were in 1991, when the Earth Summit in Rio was held and Malta committed itself to Agenda 21 and sustainable development. That major truth has been hidden from the report.

The government of Malta is making moves to start environmental improvements and Friends of the Earth (Malta) have met and spoken to capable people who are now putting the environment on the agenda and pushing for environmental change.

The government should not risk waiting until after the elections. The Maltese are fed up of much talk and no action to make environmental improvements. At the end of this electoral term we would like to look back at the past five years and say at least some measures were adopted to ensure that the Maltese enjoy a better quality of life. A new government might not have the same commitment.