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THE European Commission’s view on the prospects for the environment
in the Mediterranean sounds hopelessly optimistic. Recognising that good
work has been done in reversing environmental damage, but that it is ad
hoc in nature and on too small a scale, the Commission says in its statement
of intent: ‘It is now time to move from the pilot and preparatory phase
to the action phase’.

The aim, stated in the introductory paper to a top-level conference
on management of the environment in the Mediterranean basin, held in Cyprus
last week, is ‘to identify, finance and implement those actions necessary
to bring about a situation in which all significant environmental problems
have been eliminated by the year 2025 at the latest.’

What will turn this Utopian ambition into reality? A good deal more
talking for a start, presaging region-wide schemes backed by the European
Community, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the World Bank.

At the conference, ministers and environmental directors of most of
the countries with Mediterranean coastlines pledged themselves to clean
up the environment by adopting a document called the Nicosia Charter. Its
central tenet is that the Community, together with the World Bank, the EIB
and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will commit resources,
financial and practical, to achieve, ‘for the year 2025 at the latest, an
environment in the Mediterranean Basin compatible with sustainable development’.
The Community and the two banks will commit some $1500 million immediately
towards achieving this target.

The task is Herculean in practical terms, even if you ignore the difficulties
of persuading 18 nations of different economic, religious and political
persuasions to toe a single line. (Turkey and Libya declined to attend the
Nicosia meeting.) Just about every category of the environment in the Mediterranean
is at risk. On the land, water is scarce and the supply intermittent. Many
of the plants and animals are rare or endangered. The limited arable land
forces farmers and foresters to use high-yield techniques, and deserts –
existing or encroaching – are common.

The marine environment is equally problematic. Water exchange between
the landlocked sea and oceans is slow and limited, stratification concentrates
pollutants in specific areas and the temperatures are high. The sea, dotted
with small islands with few indigenous resources, has been grossly overfished
for the past 50 years.

The pressures on the environment include overpopulation, increased by
tourists during the summer, overexploitation of what resources there are,
and pollution. As development accelerates, particularly in the southern
states, those pressures will soar – farmers will use chemicals in far greater
quantities, industry will spread, tourism will increase and populations
will grow.

Population and natural resources are the key problems. The coastal population
is forecast to increase from 133 million to 230 million over the next 40
years, in addition to the hundred million tourists that visit the Mediterranean
each year, mostly in a short summer season. Those pressures will accelerate
soil erosion and deforestation. Community forecasts suggest that, despite
existing reafforestation programmes, a quarter of the region’s forests will
have been destroyed by 2025.

Another dire warning comes from an important international initiative
to harness the resources of the countries in the region – the Mediterranean
Action Plan (MAP) created in 1975 by signatories to the Barcelona Convention,
organised through the United Nations Environment Programme.

One element of the MAP is the Blue Plan, launched in 1979 as part of
the socioeconomic component of the MAP. The Blue Plan, which sets out a
number of scenarios for the period 2000 to 2025, is due to be published
shortly. It warns that if the trends of the past 30 to 40 years are not
reversed ‘in 40 years from now, 95 per cent of the coast may be urbanised,
and the Mediterranean Basin may have to support more than 500 million inhabitants
and 200 million tourists with 150 million cars. Each year these people will
eat 45 million tonnes of meat and 250 million tonnes of cereals and use
the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes of oil.’

The problems are further complicated by the fact that the ambitions
of the Mediterranean peoples depend on the environment being maintained
in even its current poor condition. Small wonder then that Anthony Fairclough,
author of the introductory paper to the Nicosia conference and a director
of the British company Environmental Resources Ltd, concludes that there
are ‘grounds for very serious concern, especially in relation to the coastal
strip; and that the Mediterranean Basin faces environmental problems of
particular severity’.

Fairclough’s view is that the only way to tackle this disaster-in-the-
making is to take four key steps: to implement and enforce existing environmental
regulations; to apply new measures to protect the environment; to improve
environmental standards; and finally to find the money to do all these.

The last step will probably be the most difficult. Fairclough suggests
that today’s problems are due to inappropriate or inadequate economic policies.
The right ones, he says, are to put a high price on scarce resources such
as water and beautiful coastlines and to use taxes, charges, subsidies and
incentives to protect the environment and the economies of the region.

Fairclough does not say how such realistic policies can be squared with
one of the attractions of many of these countries to well-heeled northern
tourists – the low cost of living and accommodation. But, he argues, the
Mediterranean countries have no choice. For the very source of much of the
region’s potential for development is its ecosystem. Damage it fatally and
the means of generating wealth disappear; improve it and the potential increases.

Fairclough cites what has happened in the Adriatic Sea, where over the
past year pollution of the sea from the Po River has driven away tourists
and has reduced economic activity by 30 per cent. ‘There is an urgent need
for – and an inevitability about – a decision to launch a major, cooperative
and sustained long-term effort to clean up the Mediterranean,’ he concludes.
He sees three strands in that inevitability: political, economic and environmental.

The political inevitability acknowledges the interdependence of all
the states in the Mediterranean. ‘We are all in the same boat. In each of
our countries, political and public pressure for environmental improvement
is high and growing. Without a cooperative effort to tackle the problems
of the Mediterranean Basin as a whole, we cannot respond to (the pressure)
²¹»å±ð±ç³Ü²¹³Ù±ð±ô²â.’

The economic pressure stems from the drive for development in all countries,
but particularly those on the southern shores. If no action is taken, ‘many
of our dreams of growth and development will come to nothing, drowned in
the pollution of our own creation while the environment continues to deteriorate’.

Above all, Fairclough says, concerted action is inevitable because of
the environment itself. ‘It seems to me that we have no right to hand on
this cradle of civilisations and religions to our successors in bad shape.
That means we must be ready to invest large sums of money in the necessary
curative, preventive and positive measures.’

If it sounds like a task that even Hercules would balk at, environmentalists
are less pessimistic. For example, Andreas Demetropulous, head of fisheries
in Cyprus and a leading contributor to the work of the MAP, says that the
level of cooperation between countries, including those whose need for economic
expansion might be thought to distract them from environmental priorities,
is remarkably high. He agrees with Fairclough’s view that the lengthy data
collection and planning stages since the Barcelona Convention was signed
in 1977 has produced ‘a remarkably good database on the environment’.

Equally, the biggest problems have been identified, research done and
solutions created and implemented on a pilot scale. Such solutions include
provision of sewage treatment plants for all cities with populations over
100 000 and ‘appropriate’ outfalls or treatment plants for towns with more
than 10 000 people. This long-standing and obvious step was restated as
one of the 10 objectives of the Genoa Declaration, issued after a meeting
there in 1985, to recognise the ‘Second Mediterranean Decade’.

Another step includes Community backing for countries, whether members
of the European Community or not, to build cleaning plants to remove oil
from sea water discharged by tankers before they reload. The Community recently
helped Yugoslavia to install such a plant, using mothballed supertankers
to hold and clean the polluted water before it is returned to the sea.

There are many initiatives, plans, bodies and organisations now working
on ways of saving the Mediterranean. What the Nicosia Charter tries to set
down, with complete agreement from the participants at the meeting, are
the actions that need to be taken immediately.

The charter commits the Community, the banks and the individual countries
to undertake five new tasks, to take eight ‘priority actions’, to provide
the necessary finance, to mobilise technical assistance and to raise public
awareness. The Community, for its part, will ensure that all countries receive
data on the environment. It also undertakes to draw up a long-term strategy
and action plan to achieve the fundamental objective of the charter, and
to review progress every two years.

The new tasks are: to give environmental institutes executive powers;
to integrate environmental strategies into development programmes; to establish
legal and regulatory frameworks to enforce regulations and to ensure that
development plans include environmental commitments; to assess the environmental
impact of development programmes; and to adopt financial incentives and
disincentives to improve ‘integrated management of the environment’.

The priority actions cover all aspects of environmental concern, from
identifying and protecting vulnerable coastal zones, nature conservation,
waste management, reafforestation, disposal of solid and toxic wastes, permanent
monitoring of the ecosystem and maritime traffic, energy and water saving
and a bevy of programmes to share information between all countries. The
charter lays down timescales of between three and five years.

Ministers and environment officials seemed pleased with the results
of their efforts. They believe that this is not just another list of aspirations,
but a real plan for action. Officials from countries such as Malta, Tunisia
and Algeria all said that their contributions had changed the charter in
the drafting stages to make it more appropriate to developing nations than
had seemed likely in the early stages of the meetings.

However, the rush to agree a text that ministers could adopt on Saturday
morning led to suggestions from some delegates that the wording of the charter
was not all that it might have been. On the other hand, others felt that
because there was no time to polish the prose, the document commits the
parties adopting it to take stronger action and spend more than might otherwise
have been the case. Only time will tell whether the Nicosia Charter is worth
more than the recycled paper it should have been written on.