Environmental Management: Principles and practice

European law and environmental management
The European Community (EC) grew from the six original states which signed the
Treaty of Rome in 1957 to form a closer European Union of 15 nations in 1995
which is set to expand further in the future. EU members like Sweden and The
Netherlands have long-established traditions of environmental concern; others have
given the environment far less attention. Growing EU integration should prompt and
support better policies more widely. It will also ensure common rules and ways of
monitoring, setting standards, etc. In 1992 the EU established a European
Environmental Agency as a clearing-house for environmental information. Its role is
also to evaluate and disseminate information and develop means for applying the
precautionary principle, but not enforcement of environmental policy.

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The Council of Europe (established 1949) had 35 EU and other member states
in 1995 (many former colonies, trading partners, etc.), and is active in advocacy,
cultural relations and raising awareness of issues including conservation and
environmental protection. A UN agency that acts as a pan-European forum is the UN
Commission for Europe (UNECE), which supports sustainable development,
environmental research, and has launched or serviced several agreements dealing
with issues like pollution (e.g. the 1992 Convention on Transboundary Effects of
Industrial Accidents) (Hewett, 1995). Environmental legislation is an important part
of the emerging pan-European legal system (with the European Court of Justice as
an overall arbitrator). The European Environmental Agency has not got as much
enforcement power as the US Environmental Protection Agency, and serves mainly
to gather information on the state of the European environment. The EU has also
established a European Environmental Information and Observation Network; a
European Economic Community (EEC) Directive on Environmental Impact
Assessment (Directive 85/337) —which requires environmental assessment to be
undertaken by developers; an EEC Directive on Freedom of Access to Information
on the Environment (Directive 90/313/EEC) —which requires authorities to ensure
public access to relevant environmental information; and an EC Regulation on Eco-
Management and Auditing (EMAS) (Regulation 1836/93).
One could make the broad generalization that EU environmental law has focused
on co-ordination, codification and integration (Ball and Bell, 1991; Vaughn, 1991;
Lister, 1996). Since about 1973 there has been more interest in integrating wider
environmental issues into politics alongside concern for achieving economic growth.
In 1985 the European Commission decided environmental protection should be an
integral part of economic and social policies at macroeconomic level and by sector.
This was incorporated into the Treaty of Rome in 1987 (Article 130r) and was
strengthened by the Maastrict Treaty (1993), which included a statement of concern
for sustainable growth (Winter, 1996:7, 271). EU legislation seems to be increasingly
aligning itself with global conventions such as those relating to global warming or
waste management. Since 1993 EU law has been enacted to support more freedom
of environmental information, better standard setting, the precautionary principle,
and the polluter-pays principle; Winter (1996:277) has listed the core objectives:
♦
preserve, protect and improve the quality of the environment.
♦
protect human health.
♦
prudent and rational use of natural resources.
♦
promote measures at international level to deal with regional or world-
wide environmental problems.
Hughes (1992:86) has noted that environmental management law should be
‘vertically integrated’ between regional, national and international systems. The EEC
system allows this to some extent. Efforts to develop an overall EEC environmental
policy resulted in the publication in 1973 of the First Programme of Action on the
Environment; the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Action Programmes appeared in
1977, 1983, 1987, 1992 (reviewed in 1995), and lay down principles that EEC

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environmental legislation should adhere to (Hughes, 1992:89). The Fifth Programme
of Action on the European Environment seeks to incorporate good environmental
policy into all Community policies (CEC, 1992). In the UK the 1995 Environment
Act created a powerful, wide-ranging Environmental Agency for England and Wales
(also a Scottish Environmental Protection Agency), which brought together the
functions previously spread among many agencies (pollution control, fisheries
management, flood defence, etc.) (Lane and Peto, 1995).