Environment ministers meeting in Brussels next week will put pressure on the European Commission to produce a new environmental action plan.

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With the European Union’s ten-year plan for the environment due to expire in mid-2012, ministers are keen to fix the outlines of a successor. The current plan, the sixth environmental action programme, has been the guiding framework of European environmental protection, and contained the germs of many policies, from the European emissions trading system to restrictions on pesticides.

But Janez Potocnik, the European commissioner for the environment, has been hedging on whether to propose a seventh environmental action programme. Potoc?nik insists that he is not against a follow-up, but favours waiting for an assessment of the current programme, due in 2011, before deciding what form future policies should take.

Potocnik also puts weight on policy reforms in other areas that affect the environment, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and European funds for poor regions. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and you can’t consider environmental policies without thinking about future CAP, CFP, structural and cohesion funds, the future of the EU’s research and innovation polices, and of course the debate on the next financial perspectives,” he told an audience at the European Parliament last month.

Improved ‘policy instruments’

There are indications that most member states want to see a successor to the sixth environmental programme, or at least something closely modelled on it. Environment ministers are expected to issue a statement on Monday (20 December), calling for “improved environmental policy instruments” with more coherence among the EU institutions. A new environmental plan stretching over several years has advantages for national capitals. Without such a plan, the Commission would retain considerable freedom of action. By contrast, if a new plan is agreed, member states would enjoy more control over the legislative agenda, since the EU treaty requires that any long-term plan must be agreed by ministers and Parliament.

Asked whether this was just a Brussels-beltway game, Simon Nazer of the European Environmental Bureau, said that the plan really mattered. “Europe is currently consuming the equivalent resources of two and a half planets, and without a programme to reduce this within the next 20 years we are on a disastrous path. This means there needs to be a European roadmap which touches upon not only environment but other areas such as finance, transport and agriculture.”

The environment ministers’ communiqué is expected to call for an environment policy vision for 2050, more effort on shifting to the green economy, as well as study of whether there should be EU laws on nanomaterials and so-called chemical cocktails, namely the effects on human health of different chemical combinations encountered in everyday life.