Brussels, 04/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - EU28 environment ministers want member states to ensure better soil protection by adopting measures included in the 7th Environment Action Programme (EAP), which sets out the main guidelines and priorities for environmental policy up to 2020. On Monday 3 March in Brussels, environment ministers made this known during their informal exchange of views on possibilities for relaunching a rethink and work on this subject. Ministers also believe that they need to take into account the disparities between member states and the subsidiarity principle. The draft framework directive on soil protection has effectively been blocked at the Council for more than seven years, due to a minority blockage that has proved impossible to overcome.
At the end of the session, the European Commissioner for the environment, Janez Potoènik, stated, “I wanted to hear how ministers saw the situation and how they thought we could get started again. We have a strong commitment from ministers to work towards ensuring better soil protection. The Commission has expressed its commitment in favour of this policy but indicated that it intended to withdraw its proposal because it seems to us that there is no reason to maintain it”.
It should be pointed out that the draft framework directive, the pillar for the EU's thematic soil protection strategy, aims to develop a common strategy based on including all concerns about soil in other policies, preserving the functions performed by soil, preventing threats by identifying areas requiring priority protection, creating action programmes, identifying contaminated sites and regenerating them. Although the European Parliament expressed its point of view during the first reading in November 2007, the Council has never managed to reach a political agreement on this text, due to persistent opposition from several delegations (Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom), which effectively constituted a minority blockage. These countries had already developed their own soil protection strategies and invoked the subsidiarity principle to justify their rejection of the directive. They still have doubts about the usefulness of this directive and concerns about the administrative costs that it would incur. Delegations from southern European countries were more in favour of the directive, which they believe essential in the task of stemming the worsening situation of a non-renewable resource that is subject to a multiplicity of pressures. (AN)