ES&T EUROPEAN NEWS
European Environment Agency To Begin Operations
T
his October, the first director-general of the European Environment Agency (EEA), Domingo Jiménez-Beltran, will celebrate the official opening of the new EEA headquarters in downtown Copenhagen. It's been a long wait, but the new Agency, which European policy makers have craved for more than a decade, will soon be up and running. The European Union (EU) legislation creating the Agency was passed in May 1990, but governments were locked into a quarrel over the location of several new EU institutions, including such giants as the European Monetary Institute (the future central bank] and a new Parliament building. The deadlock was broken only in October 1993, when Frankfurt won the bank, Strasbourg kept the Parliament, and Copenhagen won the EEA. At last, a budget was provided, a suite of offices located, and the management and scientific boards appointed. At a July 26 meeting in Copenhagen, the Agency's board agreed on an ambitious, 10-point work program. The new director-general, appointed in April to a five-year contract, is now formulating a detailed plan for the Agency's first full year. Beltran regards the Agency as an "interface between politicians and scientists." One of 1378 candidates for the job, Beltran was a top official with the Spanish Environment Ministry and previously worked for the environmental directorate of the European Commission. By the end of 1994 he expects to have recruited 25 of the Agency's key staff. His full staff complement will be 50. The budget for 1995 is $15.5 million. The modest scale of Europe's new Agency should not necessarily be taken as a sign of weakness. Rather than building a new bureaucracy and reinventing too many wheels, the EEA will coordinate the resources that already exist in EU states. National e n v i r o n m e n t a l agencies and ministries will supply environmental data in a format stipulated by the EEA. Through com-
BY J U L I A N
ROSE
petitive bidding, the Agency will commission research and analysis from a network of "topic centers," which by and large will be existing institutions and private-sector consultants. The new Agency will form the hub of a network of thousands of experts. The power of the EEA will be in quantifying and analyzing environmental impacts across the continent. The Agency will gather data and publish a periodic state-of-theenvironment report. Crucially, it will identify the causes of environmental damage and analyze the effectiveness of proposed policy responses. The EEA is not patterned after the U.S. E n v i r o n m e n t a l Protection Agency. The political mood in Europe requires that as much administration as possible be left to regional and member-state governments. There will be no army of European environmental inspectors. Neither will the EEA draft proposals for environmental laws, a job that remains the responsibility of the European Commission in Brussels. "The most important task for the Agency is to establish itself as a reliable, independent source of information at a low cost," Beltran told a British Parliamentary committee recently. This means the Agency must gather data on environmental pollution and emission sources and find ways of compiling and disseminating the results—all key components of the new work program. In some cases it will be necessary to verify the information the Agency receives, Beltran conceded. "It will be up to the Agency to decide how to use the information," he said. Member states will gain "added value" by cooperating with the Agency and taking advantage of its output. Skeptics doubt the effectiveness of an Agency that has to obtain its information through cooperation rather than compulsion. Powerful voices in European politics, such as Ken Collins, chair of the Euro-
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Parliament's influential environment and consumer affairs committee, argue that the EEA n e e d s powers to inspect national regulatory agencies and expose any failings. Some member states, calling for a level playing field and disgruntled at their neighbors' apparent failure to implement EU law, have also called for an "inspectorate of the inspectorates" to oversee regulatory enforcement. The European Commission has long been aware of the need for a centralized source of environmental information. Over the past 10 years there has been an immense proliferation of EU environmental laws, which now cover virtually every facet of environmental protection. In 1985, the Commission set up an experimental program, called CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment), to gather data and create an environmental database. The database, to be handed over to the EEA, contains maps of air pollutants that, for example, identify 1400 point sources of sulfur dioxide. The Agency will gather environmental data from across Europe and the M e d i t e r r a n e a n , i n c l u d i n g non-EU countries in eastern and central Europe, Scandinavia, and North Africa. At a 1991 meeting in the former Czechoslovakia European environment ministers requested that the EEA prepare a report on the state of the environment for the whole continent. The slow birth of the Agency shifted this work to an "EEA task force" within the European Commission, and a report will be presented to the next ministerial conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. There will be an opportunity to extend the EEA's powers when its founding legislation is reviewed in two years. But for now, Beltran sees his work program as quite sufficient to allow his Copenhagen Agency to prove its worth. Julian Rose is an environmental and technology writer based in London.
Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 28, No. 9, 1994
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