The EU’s recent drive to cut red tape could inadvertently scupper efforts in the developing world to improve their environmental standards, UN officials have warned.
Rolph Payet, a senior UN official on hazardous chemicals and waste, said weaker EU rules could ripple down to developing countries that look to it as a torchbearer for legislation.
‘‘Non-industrialised countries depend upon what happens in Europe for them to strengthen their national legislation and their national structures,” Payet told the Financial Times, adding that “when Europe is weakened” it also weakened African countries’ ability to deal with issues such as chemical waste.
Payet, who is the UN executive secretary for the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions on hazardous chemicals and waste, added that ambitious rules in the EU often resulted in innovation in China and India, as global companies brought plants there in line with their European facilities.
The European Commission has embarked on an effort to streamline large parts of the bloc’s complex regulatory rule book, under pressure from EU leaders and trading partners. This year it has proposed simplifications of sustainability reporting rules, a landmark supply chain law, its carbon border tax and some agricultural rules among others.
Payet said the simplification process had become too dominated by politics, as right-wing lawmakers sought to cut back ambitious environmental rules.
Lawmakers in the European parliament last week voted down a tentative agreement on the proposed simplification of sustainability reporting rules, in a highly politicised vote that was claimed as a victory by both the far left and far right.
Payet said it should “be a technical process whereby people who actually understand and know [the subject], without the industry or market influence” decide on where to simplify. “To get politicians to make that kind of decision for me is very risky.’’
“When the European Union sets those standards, it naturally cascades down the supply chain. So it’s so important then that […] rolling back [legislation] is not the way and rolling forward is,” Payet said.
Monika Stankiewicz, UN executive secretary for the Minamata Convention on mercury pollution, added that the EU also faced a “reputational risk” if it cut back too far on consumer protections. She said that people look to the EU to uphold high standards so that its citizens could maintain a good quality of life.
The chemicals sector has been among the most vocal about the level of bureaucracy, in part thanks to the EU’s complex system of registering chemicals for different uses and efforts to ban the use of some hazardous substances.
Industry groups have warned in recent weeks that the EU could inadvertently end up banning a substance critical for making hot water tanks as well as ethanol, a key ingredient in hand sanitiser.
EU leaders on Thursday asked the commission to speed up simplifying legislation across the automotive, digital and financial sectors and review the bloc’s long-standing chemicals regulation.
Jessika Roswall, the EU’s environment commissioner, told the Financial Times that she saw the green transition as “the competitive advantage for Europe” but “we need to make it easier to do business in Europe”.
She said environmental legislation was often raised as an administrative burden for businesses, with issues such as lengthy processes to get permits and the lack of harmonisation of rules across EU member states being among the most common complaints.
She defended the bloc’s simplification drive against accusations that it was in fact deregulating, particularly in the chemicals sector: “Sometimes simplification is not only to make things faster for industry, it’s also […] that we need to go faster when it comes to prohibiting chemicals that are dangerous.”
