Belgium's Environmental Management: The

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 BRUSSELS 001637

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

STATE FOR OES/ENV, EB/OGE AND EUR/UBI
USDOC FOR 3133/USFCS/OIO/EUR

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: SENV EINV BE
SUBJECT: Belgium's Environmental Management: The
Devolution of Pollution



1. (U) Summary. In contrast with government rhetoric
touting commitment to a clean environment, Belgium's
environmental management ranks poorly among EU member
states. The country's geography, linguistic divisions,
and complex political structure contribute to a
difficult environmental policymaking context.
Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels each have separate
environmental policies, under the devolved
responsibility that characterizes Belgium, which
creates coordination and legal enforcement problems.
Funding for clean-up is scarce at every level.
Stronger domestic leadership and demanding EU
Directives are now energizing Belgian efforts, but low
accountability will likely continue to slow
environmental improvement. This cable is the first of
a series of two, with the first providing a historical
and institutional perspective on Belgian environmental
policies - "the bad news", and the second focusing on
Belgium's current and future programs - "the good
news". End Summary.


2. (U) In recent months Belgium's environmental
reputation has taken several severe blows. In January
a Louvain-la-Neuve University study revealed high
levels of cadmium pollution in Wallonia, which have led
to high incidence of cancer and osteoporosis among
inhabitants. Then the Yale/Columbia review of
environmental quality released at the Davos Economic
forum ranked Belgium 39th in the world on its
Environmental Performance Index, the lowest rank among
the EU 25. Then came a scandal over dioxin
contamination in food, which was more an industrial
accident than environmental pollution, but nonetheless
led to the blocking of exports of Belgian chicken and
pork producers to the Netherlands. Finally, mid-winter
saw Brussels blanketed with the worst air quality in
recent record, which officials blamed on high
particulate matter and smog blowing in from Germany and
the East.

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A Poor Legacy from History and Society
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3. (U) Historically, Belgium has never been a leader
in environmental policy. In contrast to some neighbors
like the Netherlands, where society was organized to
hold the sea off from reclaimed land, Belgians have not
viewed nature as a challenge so much as a supply of
resources. Belgium has some high-sulfur coal in
Hainaut and Limburg provinces, well-watered
agricultural land and a strategic location for trade to
support its population. The rolling forests in the low
mountains of the Ardennes in the south cover 22 percent
of Belgium: 44 percent of the country is agricultural
or pasture land, 31 percent is natural growth or mixed
use, and nearly 3 percent is urban space and roads.
Belgium has one of the highest population densities in
Europe (338 persons per square kilometer).


4. (U) Throughout Belgium's history pioneering the
industrial revolution in continental Europe,
environmental protection was never a priority. As the
country where the first train tracks on the continent
were laid in 1835, where steel factories started in the
1840s, and where chemists and scientists like Solvay,
Lenoir, and Baekelandt achieved new breakthroughs,
Belgium benignly neglected the environmental costs of
industrial progress. Belgium, as a small, densely
populated country, was prone to pollution, and finding
employment for an expanding population became a
compelling goal in the country's rush to
industrialization. Repeated destruction by World Wars
One and Two led to a strong social consensus on
rebuilding productive capacity - to the exclusion of
other objectives such as preserving green space or
otherwise protecting the environment. A 2004 report on
Belgium's "footprint" on the earth's resources claimed
the country imposed 2.8 times the environmental burden
it should, given its population. This results partly
from the country's economic structure, which is heavily
dependent on imported resources. The Belgian economy
is largely based on the transformation of imported
factor inputs that are then re-exported; foreign trade
by value equaled over 140 percent of Belgian GDP in

2005. The port city of Antwerp, for example, has the
highest concentration of chemical and petrochemical
refining in the world after Houston. One negative by-

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product of high value-added industrial processing has
been a sad environmental legacy.


5. (U) When the rest of Europe was sensitized to the
ecology movement during the 1960s and 1970s, Belgium
was in the throes of a political resurgence of its
Flemish-speaking population. This movement to redress
the historical imbalance of power between Flemish and
French speakers led ultimately to the division of
Belgium into a federal state composed of three regions:
Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels.


6. (U) During the 1980s and 90s the European Union
started to address environmental concerns, and EU
Directives forced Belgium to align itself with European
standards for environmental policy for the first time.
Belgium's State Reform Act of August 8, 1980 was the
first to provide a defined environmental plan for
Belgium, and set both policies and standards. The
subsequent Reform Act of 1988 also permitted all three
regions to establish and implement their own
environmental policies. The 1993 Constitutional
Reforms that legislated devolution of certain powers to
the regions assigned responsibility for environmental
and agricultural sectors to the regions.

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An Unenviable Record
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7. (U) Since regional authorities inherited an abused
ecology a decade ago, they have made little progress
towards improving it. In 2004 Walloon authorities
tallied 4,580 sites of environmental pollution, of
which many were formerly industrial production or waste
sites. Flanders, which has set up a register of
pollution sites, records that 35 percent of these sites
concern heavy metals (compared to municipal waste or
agricultural discharge). Many Flemish pollution sites
suffer from inappropriate discharge of hydrocarbons, a
legacy of Antwerp port's petrochemical refining
strength. Flanders has undertaken remediation at only
a few of the numerous toxic waste situations in the
region, where one-third of sites are petroleum-related,
and another third are chemical-related. Even Brussels
city region lists nearly 940 sites "meriting
environmental investigation", of which 14 percent
relate to heavy metal residues and 2 percent to the
presence of PCBs.


8. (U) Both the Belgian public and private sectors
have neglected the ecology. Less than half of the
water effluent from Brussels - the capital of Europe to
local publicists - is treated before being pumped into
the Senne and Meuse rivers. A new treatment plant
under construction is to begin operation by end-2006 -
a decade after an EU water quality directive was
passed. Wallonia is farther behind, with a $510
million water quality project just getting underway.
Flanders fares better on water management.

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Institutional Issues
--------------


9. (SBU) Several factors in Belgium's institutional
structure contribute to Belgium's weak environmental
management. The devolution of environmental
responsibility to the regions was based on the logic
that issues more closely affecting the individual and
his community should be overseen by a political entity
closer to the constituent. Environmental oversight was
a new responsibility for the regions, whose existing
expertise (previously agriculturally focused),did not
translate rapidly into environmental surveillance,
industrial pollution regulation, legal enforcement, and
other new capabilities.


10. (U) Due to the devolved power structure, regional
action is required for Belgium to transpose EU
Directives into nationally binding regulation. Delays
at regional legislative and national coordination
levels have given Belgium a poor record in EU circles.
In July 2005, Belgium received final written warnings
from the EU Commission for not having implemented a
number of environmental directives regarding landfill,
pollutants, groundwater protection, dumping,
environmental assessment, public access to

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environmental information, and noise pollution.


11. (U) Once regulations are passed by all three
regions, legal enforcement is complicated. Federal
judges must apply regional law - which varies among
regions - for the same offence. A University of
Maastricht study of Belgian environmental law noted
that the split competence among the regions complicates
enforcement, with different requirements and differing
sanctions by region. Belgian legal scholars are
starting to recognize the need for harmonized
legislation and tougher enforcement, but corrective
action will take years.


12. (U) Regional governments do not have adequate
resources to address decades of environmental neglect.
Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels regions do not have
independent taxing authority, which resides at the
federal level. While the regions have tried to build
up their capacity to oversee, administer, and enforce
environmental policy, it has been a slow, expensive
process. Flanders has instituted a fairly thorough
register for polluted sites, but only 20 percent of
these have been fully invstigated, and only 5 percent
have been cleaned up. With the biggest environment
budget of the three regions, Flemish expenditure for
contaminated site remediation in 2002 was still only 30
euros per capita. Belgian authorities try to follow
the EU "polluter pays" principle, but this places great
dependence on the legal enforcement structure - which
is problematic, as noted above.


13. (U) Devolution of responsibility to the regional
level has also set back environmental accountability.
Environmental problems rarely respect regional or
international borders, so regional authorities must
coordinate closely with each other - as well as with
the federal government when cross-border pollution
plays a role. This results in lengthy consultation
processes, and hinders quick reactions to urgent
issues. Most issues require an intergovernmental
compromise solution, usually not the most authoritative
possible response. Recent experience on toxic site
clean-up issues showed that the outcome of inter-region
coordination is closely tied to cost-sharing, with each
region trying to minimize its respective budgetary
burden. These factors can lead to sub-optimal
environmental outcomes. For example, a cadmium
pollution report in January resulted in competitive
finger-pointing and responsibility shirking among
municipal, regional, and federal levels.

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Future Prospects
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14. (U) EU enforcement of Environmental Directives has
sensitized all to Belgium's weak environmental
performance. Progress has been made in reducing the
time needed for coordination among the regions, and
harmonization of regulations across the regions is now
an objective. This has not increased the financial
resources available for remediation, however, which
will largely rely on polluters covering costs, which in
turn requires prosecution in court.


15. (U) The Embassy has sponsored several public
diplomacy programs to assist to Belgian authorities to
strengthen environmental law enforcement, and will
cover these and other "good news" elements septel.

KOROLOGOS