Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-09-Speech-4-012-000"
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"en.20110609.3.4-012-000"2
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"Madam President, honourable Members, Mr Potočnik and I are pleased that we have a parliament that has made the monitoring of environmental regulations a focal area of its work, as is the case in this instance. The EIA Directive is of great value for the ecological development of the European Union. For us, it is an important instrument for achieving sustainable development.
The Commission will take action to ensure that the Austrian authorities look at the environmental impact of the work that has already been carried out in order to ensure that in any future expansion of the ski area in the region around Damüls-Mellau, the requirements of our directive are applied in accordance with the rules. In other words, we have all learnt from the mistakes made in this individual case.
It states that projects that have a substantial impact on the environment must undergo an assessment in which all their direct, but also indirect, effects on the environment are evaluated. These are types of projects in which the Member States have to decide, using threshold values, whether the results of this assessment mean that an EIA must be carried out. The circumstances in your ski area belong to a class of projects in which Member States have long had to decide whether an EIA is necessary.
The Austrian legal provision was not really satisfactory in the past. It concerned an area of 10 hectares or of 20 hectares or more. After we received the petition, the Commission asked the Austrian Government how it had ensured that the directive was properly applied in this project. Austria replied that it had not had to carry out an EIA because the threshold of 20 hectares had not been reached. There was then official doubt on our part. We pointed out that in determining the size of the area, and thus deciding on whether an EIA was necessary, an overall view should be taken rather than looking at the area in its narrower sense.
Austria then revised its law on EIAs, which I think is the most important result in this individual case. In our legal opinion, it now complies in every respect with the requirements of the European EIA Directive. The decision as to whether an EIA is necessary when a ski area is expanded now depends overall on the size of the enlargement in land area and whether it lies within a designated nature conservation area. Moreover, earlier expansions are also now to be included in the appraisal.
The requirements of the EIA Directive are actually clearly and strictly stated in this respect. Circumventing these merely by subdividing projects into stages, into sections or tranches, is not possible. We place great importance on an overall analysis of the impact on nature. The European Court of Justice has confirmed our interpretation of the law. It has made it clear on more than one occasion that the aims of the EIA Directive cannot be circumvented by subdividing projects. As far as the threshold area is concerned, taking into consideration only those surfaces on which building work is actually to be carried out is too narrow. We are concerned not just with the building work, but also with its overall integration into the surrounding area. In other words, when calculating whether the threshold area is reached, one must include areas in which no building works are actually taking place, but which are indisputably part of the project and part of the impact of the project.
That is why we feel that screening should have been carried out in the Damüls-Mellau ski area before the expansion took place in order to establish whether an EIA was necessary for the project. This decision should also have been made public, giving the reasons behind it. These are the obligations with which the Austrian authorities did not comply. They failed to carry out such screening, which, in our view, was a requirement.
The project is in the past; it was decided on five years ago and approved five years ago. Construction is already complete. We have therefore requested further details of the effects of the works from the authorities in Vienna and have also made enquiries as to whether measures to alleviate the consequences are necessary and can still be considered. Once we have received this information, we will examine whether further steps can be taken to alleviate the effects on nature in this area as a whole.
We have also asked the authorities in Austria to confirm to us that in the event of the future expansion of this or other ski areas which met the criteria under the old version of the Austrian act on environmental impact assessments, screening will first be carried out to ascertain whether an EIA is necessary. Mr Potočnik is currently working on a revision of the EIA Directive. Both he and we intend to submit a new text that further enhances environmental protection, which especially takes into consideration the areas of climate change, energy and biodiversity, which also includes relevant important rulings by the European Court of Justice and which harmonises and simplifies the existing procedures as far as possible and, moreover, excludes circumvention more clearly than previously.
Mr Potočnik is in the process of preparing the recast of this directive and has therefore consulted broadly with the public and the relevant interest groups over the past year. The results are currently being evaluated and we will table a proposal accordingly in 2012 at the latest. The improper execution of this construction work will at least have a positive effect for the future, because European law will be worded more clearly and will no longer be so easy to circumvent. We are pleased that the Austrian act on the EIA now complies with the directive."@en1
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