VZCZCXRO6509
RR RUEHAG RUEHDF RUEHIK RUEHLZ
DE RUEHBS #1637/01 1361650
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 161650Z MAY 06
FM AMEMBASSY BRUSSELS
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 1900
INFO RUCNMEM/EU MEMBER STATES COLLECTIVE
RUCPDOC/USDOC WASHDC

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. 
 
-------------------------------------- 
A Poor Legacy from History and Society 
-------------------------------------- 
 
¶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- 
 
BRUSSELS 00001637  002 OF 003 
 
 
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. 
 
-------------------- 
An Unenviable Record 
-------------------- 
 
¶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. 
 
-------------------- 
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 
 
BRUSSELS 00001637  003 OF 003 
 
 
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. 
 
---------------- 
Future Prospects 
---------------- 
¶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