PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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It was the Single European Act (SEA) that provided environmental policy with a
firm legal basis for action. Article 130r of the SEA sets out the following objectives:
to preserve, protect and improve the quality of the environment;
to contribute toward protecting human health;
to ensure a prudent and rational utilization of natural resources
(quoted in: Collier 1996:6)
The Single European Act also introduced the polluter pays and the precautionary
principles, and introduced qualified majority voting for environmental measures. 4
After
this, EU environmental legislation increased exponentially. For example, in the two short
years between 1989 and 1991, the Environmental Council adopted more policies than it
had in the 20 years before that (Jordan 1998). Following the Single European Act, the
Fourth Environmental Action Program (EAP 1987-1992) marked an important shift from
a sectoral approach carving up environmental issues according to various subject areas
towards an integrated approach that took a more comprehensive view. It also began to
focus more on the key question of implementation.
4 Note that in ratifying the Rio Declaration, the EU had already de facto accepted the precautionary
principle. The Rio Declaration mentions and explains the concept in the following manner:
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States
according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full
scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent
environmental degradation.
The ‘polluter pays’ principle is also one of the key environmental principles of the EU Treaty. In 2000, the
Commission adopted a White Paper on Environmental Liability (COM [2000] 66 final) which explores the
details of how to implement the general principle, concluding that the best option was to issue a new
Framework Directive on Environmental Liability. Also see
http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/liability (last accessed on Jan 10, 2002). Qualified Majority Voting
(QMV) is one of several formal rules of decision for the European Council, as contrasted with unanimity,
simple majority voting, or the co-decision procedure which includes the parliament. Decision rules have
been amended several times in successive treaty reforms. However, even in the latter revisions to Article
130r in the Maastricht Treaty, several significant areas of policy making remained exempted from QMV,
among them fiscal, town, country and land use planning, as well as energy measures (see Collier 1996:6).