EU Sues Six Member States For Not Adopting Environmental Laws
The European Commission (EU) has announced intentions to sue six of its member states for failure to implement EU environmental rules as national law.
The pending lawsuits come after a year of waiting for the offending states to comply. All of this in the light of the EU's new push to come down hard on polluting industry and reduce carbon emissions by 30% by 2020.
Five of the nations: Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece and Luxembourg, are being taken to task for not having proper information-sharing laws in place. According to the EU, these laws are imperative for cross-continent data gathering--whether this be information on protected sites or emissions data and environmental quality.
"It is important to be able to combine these different types of data to obtain the best information on how to better protect our society from, for example, the many possible impacts of climate change and air pollution as well as natural and technological disasters," the EU Commission said.
Belgium is also being targeted, though for a different reason. According to the EU, Belgium has failed to implement specific standards for underground water quality and limiting the amount of pollutants that can reach groundwater.
The European Commission announced that Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain have all been warned about their lack of laws protecting groundwater.
Under EU legislation, member states have to publish a management plan for each river basin district. Member states sharing international rivers must work together to produce a single international river basin management plan.
The Water Framework Directive, which came into force in 2000, provides a framework for integrated water management in river basin districts across the European Union. It obliges member states to protect and restore all bodies of ground water and surface water (rivers, lakes, canals and coastal water) to achieve good status by 2015 at the latest.
Harry Tournemille has been covering renewable energy and cleantech sectors for Energy Boom for almost two years. With a focus on solar, wave, and biofuel energies, Harry looks to find real-life applications for the host of information being put out on a daily basis.
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