It gives me great pleasure to be here and I thank the committee very much for making time available for us to come here. I recognise that part of the reason we are here is the provocation caused by the state of environment report we brought out, which I believe created some headlines in the national press here. I would like to make a presentation following which I will be happy to answer questions on the report and, more broadly, on issues the committee is facing and discussing with regard to the reason we have brought forward this year for the first time a country score card in the context of Europe. It is important that we spend some time dealing with that aspect.
The agency is based in Copenhagen and approximately 150 members of staff are based there. They cover expertise ranging from air quality, climate change, water, land use, biodiversity, agriculture, energy, transport, etc. We cover the whole range of the environment and impacts on the environment. However, a critical aspect of our work is that we do not work alone but with clients and stakeholders. National representatives, like the members of the committee, are represented on our board by a board member, a national focal point and a network of specialists inside the country.
In addition, we also take care of a network of protection agencies, the implementing arm of many of the ministries. On the one hand we have dialogue with you, the deliverers of policy, and, on the other hand, the front line troops, so to speak, implement the policies in the national context. Our job is to ensure that any decisions made along that chain are informed by proper and up-to-date information and data, as we can provide it, and that it is put into the right policy context. We bring forward opinions and value our independence. So, although in a sense we represent your collective views through the collective data flows that come to us, we in turn ensure our opinions are based on our independent analyses, both scientific and technical, in all the major policy areas that are your concern.
We also provide support to the agriculture and transport sectors and in energy debates. We ensure that the environment is well positioned throughout much of the discussion within the Lisbon Agenda and the better regulation agenda. Many of these carry an environmental element and we are the locus of the origination of that data and information.
We are required to produce a report every five years and our regulation is to assess the state of the environment and to give outlooks for the future. In the 2005 report, we took a step forward with all members, with their consent, and gave a country profile. It was not just a European profile. This was not to step over into the issue of subsidiarity but to give members a view of themselves as seen from the European perspective. That is why, in part C, we have taken the data flows and the information provided by members to build up indicators on environmental performance and progress towards political targets. We put that spotlight on every country.
Why have the countries come out as they have? There are three or four conditions that enable us to analyse both performance and progress and make more sense of it. Clearly, longevity is part of the solution here. When we look at our scorecard, which in the report is a rather large league table, there is a cluster of countries which by their performance all look very similar. Politically, they are the new member states. One can see from their performance that they are making good progress. They have differential targets but they are putting in place the type of legislation and implementation we would expect.
There is another cluster of countries — the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden — which have another composite of performance and then there is the cluster of Ireland, Spain and Portugal. The clustering around the performance there is clearly an outcome not so much of aspirations or motivation in the environment field but of economic development. One sees, therefore, three countries that are undergoing and have undergone in the last five to ten years significant economic and infrastructure development which,ipso facto, has an environmental impact. Therefore, it is not without comment that the areas of red in the performance for Ireland sit within the consequences of that development — emissions of greenhouse gases, emissions into air so air quality is compromised, the way transport is developing and the way waste has increased.
That is not to say, however, and in the text we put more flesh on the bone, that these indicators do not actually suggest good progress. The encouraging areas are across the board. Ireland has already taken on board the significant progress that can be made with consumer awareness. When consumers are alerted to what their impacts can be on the environment there is a return on that. There are significant improvements in the way Ireland is tackling waste, albeit it is living through the legacy of a long-term process where there was not as much attention paid to waste. One can see, for example, that there are changes in electricity generation with renewables being encouraged and supported. There are a number of other areas.
The fundamental issue for Ireland in our analysis is that there is a legacy and many of the policies being debated and implemented today will take time to deliver real benefits and outcomes. The final message we can give — the report considers the outlooks for Europe and individual countries and we try to give a synthetic view of what the economy of Europe looks like with its significant draw on resources from around the world — is that shifting the problem across boundaries does not help in the long term. It always comes back to every nation state having to address the problem at home. It means having to address how to deliver energy demand in an increasingly price sensitive market and how to address international conventions such as Kyoto and the biodiversity convention in a realistic way without compromising economic development.
We see solutions. We can also provide a very good insight into what the future looks like because a large section of the report discusses the spatial planning of Europe. We can already tell Ireland that its future is well known. It is already mapped out with its transport policies, the urbanisation patterns that are in place and the trends in agriculture, water quality and climate change. We would say that there is not much room for manoeuvre. Many of the resources are already under pressure, not just in Ireland but in other places, and this is what needs attention. There must be integration of environmental thinking with some of the larger policies on transport, energy and even in the competition in services directive, all of which have a direct impact on the environment.
We allude to that in the report and I believe we can be somewhat prescient about the future of Ireland through providing Ireland and ourselves with information of a local nature as well as of a European nature. European regulation works. It takes a long time to deliver changes, sometimes up to 30 years, so one must be patient. There is a collective responsibility at European level to ensure we stand by the directives we put in place. Our job is to ensure they are implemented well through auditing and monitoring the implementation of the policies that are debated and put in place in national legislation.
I will be happy to answer questions.
