Platform Moris Lanvironnman's provides comprehensive commentary on the Environment Bill. The Bill, scheduled for a vote during tomorrow's session of the National Assembly, is strongly criticized for its lack of ambition in safeguarding our environment and vital natural ecosystems, as articulated in the opening statement: "This Environment Bill fails to demonstrate innovation or transformative potential. Instead, it adheres to a Business-As-Usual approach, favoring technological and market-based solutions to environmental crises. Despite incorporating various 'new' piecemeal measures, instruments, and mechanisms, the bill lacks coherence, thereby failing to bolster our resilience as a vulnerable Small Island Development State.”Please find below the Open Letter addressed to the Prime Minister, in their roles as Chairperson of the National Environment Commission and proposed Chairperson of the National Environment and Sustainable Development Commission, as well as to the Minister of Environment, Solid Waste Management, and Climate Change:

Environment Bill? Economic Business as Usual, authorised.

This Environment Bill is neither innovative nor transformative. It is accommodating of a Business- As- Usual, technology-and-markets approach to the environment crises. It is so even when stuffed with a collection of “new” piecemeal measures, instruments and mechanisms, not all of which connect together coherently, in order then to build our resilience as a vulnerable Small Island Development State (SID).

The Bill claims to be modern. This is an empty catch phrase. The voluminous Bill is in fact full of loose and vague words. The Assises de l’Environnement had in early 2020 identified three main underlying causes, drivers of environmental degradation: an overriding focus on high income, high consumptionled, business- driven economic growth; a silo approach to governance and a top-down approach, marginalising local - especially deprived - communities and population groups. The efforts to remedy those through this bill are shallow and bound to be ineffectual with its highly narrow lens of what multi-stakeholder engagement means. The Bill is disturbingly silent on a bottom-up, citizen-centric approach. It betrays a reactive, authoritarian, opaque, closed government approach, so evident since the Covid pandemic crisis, then immediately followed by the Wakashio preventable catastrophe and more recent flash flood episodes.

In a loose piece of legal drafting, “Mauritius” is not defined. We are not sure in numerous references throughout the text, whether it is Mauritius Island or the Republic of Mauritius and thus of the territorial jurisdiction of this Bill. There is no clarity over our vast maritime territory and its critical environmental stewardship. Ominously, ocean-based oil exploration and extraction, blue economy, do not form part of the list of undertakings requiring a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). We are especially concerned about the biodiversity aspects. The Environment bill reads more like an economic and sustainable development bill. If high economic growth, high imported, debt-fuelled consumption as well as higher and faster private car ownership are no longer the aspirational and operational goals, why have these immense and welcome policy shifts not been signalled in the appropriate forum? It is surely what this legislation seems to entail.

The Explanatory Memorandum declares that the Bill purports to aim for environmental sustainability. But what does this abstract term really mean? We note with alarm in its interpretation section, that the term environment - besides air, water, living organisms- includes “any built-up environment”! We are at a loss to understand how to reconcile this definition with for instance, our First Biennial Update Report to UNfCC, which sees rapid urbanisation - most of which policy-induced - as a key driver of the environmental degradation that has accelerated over the decade. The Bill’s intent is not seen in precise, concrete terms, to restore nature, ecosystem functions and services as much as possible and to adopt nature-based solutions to addressing climate change. Maybe because biodiversity is not the main mission of the Ministry presenting this bill. It is to achieve sustainable development, without defining it rigorously, and through transitioning to a “circular” and “green economy”.

Yes, treating nature as an economic resource to be used judiciously, is less bad than treating it as a free natural one, as if infinite. But it is still treating it as a resource for human, especially private profitoriented, exploitative, corporate ends. Can invasive, extractive capitalism - with its short- term imperative - green and reform itself after centuries of cumulatively exploiting, appropriating and subjugating nature across the globe and in our little hub, just through adopting sustainable development? It is not this bill which holds out this hope!

The stakes are high- to reverse course to save us from the triple interlocking crisis of climate change, pollution and erosion of biodiversity. It takes courage and a long hard existential look at our ways of thinking about our human relationship with nature, change how we treat it and value it, while being part of it. This is the emerging contemporary thinking on managing the environment. But whichdespite its claim of being modern - is nowhere visible in the decision to repeal the Environment Protection Act of 2002 (EPA) and replace it with this Bill.

The rights to nature and the rights of nature as legal rights. In taking stock of the cumulative damage and loss when nature is exploited and which is also incurred by the poor, marginalised communities depending on it, there is emerging awareness that the right to nature is a human rights issue. In July 2022, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognising the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right for all. But more profoundly, there is growing realisation that we need to recalibrate our relationship to nature.

Granting rights to non-human entities such as trees, animals, rivers, entire ecosystems can now be the only way forward to tackle the worst impacts of climate change, increasing pollution and eroding biodiversity. The awareness that humanity has to put the rights of nature as a set of legal rights, in order to be compelled to preserve ecosystems, is slowly becoming more mainstream, as is the notion of ecocide. It is no longer marginal in countries intent on an ecological transition. That means granting legal personhood to nature as we do to the corporations who so harm it. And as humans, we can be its guardians, representing it - un-capacitated - in court in much the same way as we do other nonhuman entities. We are now becoming more knowledgeable about and appreciative of these complex life-forms and what binds us all together. The whole vexed issue and let-off clause of having to prove that one is directly and personally aggrieved by an environmental harm to bring a case into ligitation, to be In Locus Standi, is no longer relevant. These are the truly innovative, groundbreaking pieces of legislation in many countries. Such a move requires a profound cultural shift away from the 16th Century Western scientific revolution’s view of nature as useful and to be subjugated. But it is not quite what the bill has in mind when advocating adopting a “culture environnementale” as environmental stewards. It has a more traditional human-centric, utilitarian goal. There is a token, oft-reproduced phrase in this Bill “taking into consideration inter alia, human rights, cultural heritage and gender aspects” however….

Environmental Governance.

PER, EIA or SEA approval mandatory for public interest undertaking. The also fraught notion of public interest and national interest for that matter, is used in a loose, unclear way in the Bill. Public interest needs to be legally circumscribed. And not just invoked in potentially contradictory, arbitrary ways at the discretion of ministers, who may not be necessarily public spirited. Section 31 “PER, EIA or SEA approval mandatory for public interest undertaking” is at best ambiguous. Is this legal ambiguity deliberate so as to dispense undertakings listed in the Sixth Schedule from making PER/EIA/SEA reports public and inviting comments from the public without prior delisting of the undertakings? Section 28 of the EPA 2002 as subsequently amended provided for the publication of EIA reports for Exempt Undertakings. Will this still be the case if Section 31 of the Bill is voted and promulgated?

The Bill pays a lot of attention to environmental governance matters: Silos. But the nature of this governance is contentious. Nor is there anything new in this regard. It is quite clear that some attempt has been made to address continual assessments of the silo, piecemeal approach to conducting government business. So there are many hierarchical layers of committees presented in this Bill. There is even a committee to coordinate these multi-state agency committees. But creating coordinating committees is not sufficient to effectively overcome institutional and technical silos and mindsets. It can harden them further, without prior political, intellectual and continual proactive leadership to harmonise across domains of sustainable development and within operational levels. Environmental Management cannot be simply reinvented, if the political-bureaucratic incentives are not there. We also know that sound, conscientious, professional and technical advice is not necessarily rewarded and may be punished in the public sector, with its administrative and technical cadre dual system. And where ministerial discretion overrides all.

The Bill is meant to address shortcomings of the EPA: It reproduces them. If there has been a policy evaluation, it has not been put before Parliament, which is now being asked to pass this bill. Nor has it been published. But when we look at the Bill and consider how environmental management has actually been practised over the last few years, and continues to be practised, its shortcomings remain.

There is nothing in this Bill which makes impunity in flouting it by its government custodians harder. The Minister has as much discretion as ever for suspending parts of it and of interpreting it as s/he thinks fit. Rather than making a clean break with past errors, such as delisting Metro Express Limited (MEL) from the requirements of an PER/EIA licence under EPA , we find its continuing legacy enshrined in the Sixth Schedule. This Bill provides for the same delisting (22); the New Social Living Development Ltd, National Housing Company Ltd. (24) and the construction of airports and runways (6) and jetties (7) in Agalega and Rodrigues. While other mass transit, housing units and runways and jetties are in general subject to EPA. This makes the bill’s high-sounding window-dressing totally unacceptable.

The disconnect between policy design, legal and technical documents, and actual application, monitoring and effective remedy on the ground, will persist. Meanwhile we have been subjected to the consequences of the ensuing environmental degradation and social problems in many localities 4 impacted by the expanding tram lines. Or as building permits, flouting planning policy guidance, actually hovers like a sword of Damocles above our mountain slopes, now global abodes, like our coastlines, of enormous financial wealth.

The closed loop of government, but open to donor assistance. Except in rare cases, only environment NGOs seen in a good political light are now included in governance and technical matters. Nevertheless, the veneer of inclusiveness and participation exists. And the document trail of virtuous, state of the art pronouncements is sufficient to satisfy international donor assistance’s own governance exigencies and prerequisites for accessing technical and financial assistance. It’s all on paper. They are less directly concerned and impacted than we citizens are by the political economy, which undermines the virtuous well-meaning content of the drafters. Sadly, many of the documents either crafted by and/or made available to external expertise are not in the public domain. For instance, the Updated National Climate Change Adaptation Policy Framework of 2021, so widely quoted in international documents, and attesting to the government’s substantive seriousness, is not available to the concerned organisations and wider public. They have been kept out of its development and from even seeing its content once finalised.

Formulation of National Policies and Priorities for Protection of the Environment

The National Environment and Sustainable Development Commission: Whole of Government with one glaring omission. This apex body is chaired by the Prime Minister. It testifies to the concern over broader sustainable development. But it is less clear, despite the Commission’s appellation, that it is environment which is the critical mainstreaming and cross-cutting lever. The main thrust remains the environment’s role in modifying the economy, the chief focus of interest. But in some limited way. Otherwise, it would remain the lowest, most subordinate priority that it was assigned in early 2015. Unless, as now, there is a significant business and financial opportunity to be made from tackling environment and meeting national commitments to it. The Covid-19 pandemic crisis did provide a vastly higher scale of resource disruption and mobilisation.

But while the ministerial responsibilities straddle both drivers and impacted sectors, the minister for social protection is not part of this Commission. It underscores the low concern given to the more impoverished powerless victims of loss and damage. Whether from the Wakashio localities and communities and/or those of torrential rains, consequent urban and coastal flash flooding, from ridge to reef.

Set national objectives and goals, and determine policies and priorities in accordance with obligations under multilateral environmental agreements and sustainable development: The Bill is a tick-box in itself. Our successive governments have, since the 2005s progressively abandoned policy and planning and development control, to unbridled laisser-faire business facilitation. The policymaking objective is disingenuous. Policy is never the subject of parliamentary oversight. And those many implicit policies buried in the Finance Bill are never given time to be aired.

So, it looks like this piece of legislation is part of the requirements to give a legislative and regulatory framework to the policies already concluded by the executive alone, with a number of international organisations and to access climate and other finance.

● Such as circular economy policy, green economy policy. Such as the policies regarding Sustainable Production and Consumption (SCP).

We are told that it is SCP that will steer the economy to achieve Sustainable Development. This reduces the multi-dimension agenda of Sustainable Development to the economy again. And all this terminology actually refers to what? We have no normative guidance, such as the body of human rights and its jurisprudence or Agenda 2030 or African Agenda 2063 to steer towards…

The Circular Economy; But some of the 9Rs are missing. The overall stance is still Business As Usual. Some of the solid assessments made of the feasibility of the Circular Economy does show the scope for making it integrated and mainstream and meeting the norms. But it does take the business and their waste streams and convert them into material business opportunities for granted. We do not see any prior evaluations of these sectors in qualitative terms in the first place. In particular, real estate, hospitality and infrastructure development, the overwhelming large share of foreign direct investment. What is missing is the beginning of the circularity.

● What about Refuse, Redesign?

● We should bring this into the picture as a vulnerable SID. We should pitch towards it. Otherwise we will be locked into a material - no longer waste- incentive to expand these sectors to make material circularity viable. Like we nearly did with Waste to Energy.

● Are we are thinking into the circularity box rather than focusing on how do we stop our lagoons from dying of eutrophication and how to regenerate them, how to stop our topsoil already polluted and nutrient poor, from being washed away in torrential rains? What are our existential priorities?

Sustainable Consumption and Production, Green Economy: How to address the materialist, consumerist shopping mall culture, psychology, or can we now embrace it without guilt? It is quite revealing how this month, public sector pay will be paid early because of Mother’s Day. When love is evaluated in terms of what we buy and give materially, as in consumer advertising, what are we decoupling in terms of well-being and security? These sorts of profound questions are hardly posed. Yet they should be. Green jobs could be care jobs, green infrastructure could be investing in care infrastructure and services, rebuilding broken mentally-scarred societies. As well as we do need to invest in flash flood averting systems which reduce the need for poor people in flood prone localities not to have to replace their basic hard-earned material belongings over and over again! That would be meaningful, just and real adaptation and resilience.

Monitoring, review, taking sanctions; dead letter clauses, just on paper. Like other high level interministerial commissions, there is nil accountability, least of all to Parliament. Any credible independent evaluation of the EPA would have generated the evidence-base for the defective nature of monitoring. What is the point of all this legal arsenal if it is not really to be made operational? As citizen environmental defenders, we confront silence and indifference when we call on the authorities to abide by their own supposedly stringent, environment monitoring conditions. This Bill is as massively generous on government powers as it is miserly on its accountability. It has impunity, both in commission and omission.

National Network on Sustainable Development. Again, a within- government exercise, no independent institutions. The failures of environmental governance are compounded by a state monopoly, stranglehold without the means and the real will to drive such a network. How can an opaque government establishment - with a politically-deferential ethos - which now spreads to nominally more autonomous public institutions - carry out all these complex difficult tasks? We need independent, well-resourced and endowed institutions and agencies. It needs to be a whole of society exercise. But in not quite in the same way of the technocratic social engineers who claim that establishing circular economy will actually transform social structures.

Committee on the Observatoire de L’Environnement: Again another non-inclusive, in-house power of the Department for Environment. First of all, the Observatoire already exists as a donor-sponsored project. It is now being given legal force. The definition of environmental data is unnecessarily restrictive, as one can distinguish between different data types and their uses and validity. The Committee is hosted by the Department. How that interface will keep abreast of all the developments taking place is a moot question.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting-Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA). No sponsor for adoption and legislating for? There is already a glaring omission as far as data standards and environmental accounting is concerned, while the bill’s spotlight is on the economy. How can there be an Observatoire that is not built around the construction of a set of ecosystem accounts? In March 2021, the UN Statistical Commission adopted the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting, as an international statistical standard. We were a pilot country in 2013! The SEEA- EA provides detailed guidance in measuring the extent and condition of ecosystems, and how to quantify ecosystem services. There is guidance on physical accounts (extent, condition and services}. There is guidance as well on monetary accounts (ecosystem services, ecosystem assets and sequence of accounts). Countries are encouraged to develop the accounts for their use in policy and decision-making processes in both public and private sectors.

Now, as a truly sovereign, forward-looking, supposedly affluent SID, that would be innovative and salutary to adopt such accounting for our Republic as we grapple with our dire predicament. It would introduce greater coherence and harmonisation, a unifying vision across these different bits of environmental practice, not all of which are captured in the medley contained in the Bill.

Science to Policy Platform: No room for citizen science. The breakdown of trust between citizens and the state, so evident in the Wakashio catastrophe, permeates our “culture environnementale” which the Bill empowers our Minister to inculcate. This “modern” piece of legislation is silent on citizen science. While it is gaining ground. It is not surprising. As the Bill is so poorly etched in terms of adaptation, in terms of stipulating anything beyond the blandest generalities when it comes to society, culture, psychology, philosophy, spirituality and such vital matters to our resilience. It is politically autocratic also.

We also call out the still unpublished Digital Elevation Model and Land Drainage Maps. Since the 2013 tragic flooding, the many studies containing scientific data and multi-modelling of flood risk which have even been in the open domain, have not been brought to bear to prepare and respond to the more recent flooding episodes which happened in quick succession. Why? And will this bill by itself fix this?

Establishment of Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) Committee: What is the interface with the Observatoire de l’Environnement? We may well ask, and perhaps to the Environment Coordinating 7 Committee. We may also need to see how that also interfaces with Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). And especially given the ongoing destruction and encroachment of critical ESAs, while welcoming Financial Wealth abodes attracted to desirable ESAs, turning them into such astronomically lucrative real estate sites.

National Oil Spill Contingency Plan: Only oil spills, no other chemicals and they do not combust? There does not seem to be provision for other technological hazards, their preparedness and response contingency, why?

Oil spill prevention? Where are the Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas (PSSA) protecting our vulnerable coastal ESAs - under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea -UNCLOS? Despite some expert voices acclaiming this Bill Post Wakashio, there is nothing in the bill to prevent ship groundings, collisions and their catastrophic long drawn-out impacts. The review and update of this plan now enshrined in the Bill somehow managed to do this without learning lessons from the Wakashio and its victim communities, who still have not been compensated, let alone given reparation. Just bits of charity in the form of MOL’s (the Japanese charterer) small conservation projects. The Report of the Court of Investigation has not been made public. And all the secrecy shrouding the evidence base of ecosystem and living organism damage of course makes all the provisions for environmental data, science to policy, particularly hollow.

Despite what the Bill says about the ICZM Committee’s role regarding resources of the seabed and subsoil of the maritime zone, there has not been any effort to act on an additional buffer to limit damage by declaring a PSSA - under the aegis of the International Maritime Organisation -, in sensitive areas subject to heavy motorised maritime traffic. It has been proposed since the Benita grounding in 2016. We are as at risk of maritime hazard as ever, along our vulnerable coastline. But h without really involving local communities in proactively engaging in its surveillance and stewardship, they will continue to face devastating life threatening consequences.

How can we speak in one breath, of nature-based solutions and managed retreat and in another, envisage encircling our High Water Mark with fenced coastal protection quarried boulders for coastal protection? The lack of fit of this Bill with the government’s actual environmental undertakings, is breath-taking.

Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA): What an enormous misrepresentation! And where is the Minister for Land Use’s strategy? SEAs is at the top of the assessment cascade. It applies to the framing of policy, in drawing plans, strategies both multi-sectoral and spatial. How can the terminology of an operational undertaking - public interest or otherwise - be used to refer to it? The 2020 National Development Strategy is expired. The Ministry has still not made public the revised NDS. As he presses on vigorously with land use and real estate allocations, plotting and sub-plotting, to support the Economic Development Board and other economic sectors. And now the Minister for Environment leaves out land use policy and planning among the undertakings subject to SEA. While it is the preeminent strategic portfolio that other countries have conducted SEA on, and as part of climate finance preparatory assistance.

How can we treat this Bill seriously?

THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE FUND. A Special purpose vehicle (SPV). But what about climate public budget tagging and tracking as well as to derive the benefits of Mauritius as an offshore hub for green financial flows? The Bill does not have a comprehensive coverage of environmental transactions as economic and financial ones. There has been some work on increasing the transparency of actual public budget spending. This is out of the Consolidated Fund. The Minister of Finance is the Nationally Designated Authority for climate finance. Budget tracking is a part of the mechanisms for financial governance of the outstanding amounts of external climate funds that have to be mobilised. Why this SPV when we want to mainstream green and circular economy across all sectors and that can be tracked? If there were independent environmental agencies, dedicated to specific purposes and which can attract diverse funding sources, the fund would make sense. But there is no such provision in the Bill. It is not accountable as SPV.

The Bill does not make provision for its effective means of implementation. What provisions are there for monitoring capacities, human, informational, institutional and thus financial above all? How much resources does the Ministry for Environment command, to respond adequately? Without which much is just an exercise of power, without effective outcome. Who is the Bill intended for?

Nalini Burn

For Platform Moris Lanvironnman

13 May 2024

Annex: Open Letter to the Prime Minister as Chairperson of the National Environment Commission and proposed Chairperson of the National Environment and Sustainable Development Commission, and the Minister of Environment, Solid Waste Management and Climate Change, 20 April 2024

Annex 1

Open Letter to

The Prime Minister as Chairperson of the National Environment Commission and proposed Chairperson of the National Environment and Sustainable Development Commission

The Minister of Environment, Solid Waste Management and Climate Change

20 April 2024

Environment Bill and the inclusion of Strategic Environment Assessment in the Bill

Honourable Prime Minister,

Honourable Minister of Environment, Solid Waste Management and Climate Change,

First of all, may we thank you for introducing to the National Assembly, a new Environment Bill with a section on Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA), which is not present in the Environment Protection Act of 2002, as amended in 2008.

We are in the process of completing our review of the Environment Bill but wish, for now, to address one aspect of the Bill that deals with Strategic Environmental Assessment.

We welcome the inclusion of Strategic Environment Assessment (thereafter referred as SEA) in the Environment Bill.

It is recalled that the inclusion of SEA is among our proposals to the Assises de l’Environnement in 2020, and followed through in subsequent workshops as well as during earlier consultations on the review of EPA.

Indeed, since its creation in 2010, Platform Moris Lanvironnman has been relentlessly advocating for the reintroduction of SEA in our environmental legislation, after it had been removed in the EPA of 2002 through regulations (GN No. 142 of 2006) a couple of months after the promulgation of the Business Facilitation Act (2006).

SEA is the most important strategic tool at policy level for the protection of the environment and assisting the country in achieving sustainable development.

However, we are disappointed and seriously concerned by the contents of the section on SEA and the relevant schedule in the Environment Bill.

Indeed, Sub-Part F – Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of the Environment Bill treats SEAs as if they are like broader Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), but which consider cumulative aspects. However, EIAs - by definition and manner of assessment - apply to specific projects further down the policy and planning hierarchy. They focus at project level on doing no or less harm.

SEA, on the other hand, frames individual EIAs and determines what is most good, at higher governance levels. It is carried out at public policy and planning level. When carried out systematically, ex ante early in the formulation of proposals and initiatives, when major policy and planning alternatives and options are still open for higher level decision-making, SEA helps decision-makers achieve important environmental objectives and sustainable development goals: It is a process for identifying, analysing and addressing the implications of proposed public policy frameworks, policies, strategies, plans, and programmes or other strategic initiatives. SEAs entail identifying and evaluating a reasonable range of alternatives to the proposed initiative – against the economic, social, environmental, technical and financial implications of each option and using a number of guiding and procedural principles.

Public consultations at large and not only of targeted stakeholders, for instance, are an essential part of the holistic SEA process where all stakeholders have an early and effective opportunity to express their diverse views - knowledge, insights and perspectives - on the formulation of the policy, plan or programme before their eventual adoption.

SEAs are initiated by supranational, national or regional authorities and not by the private sector - except for master plans. For instance,

a) the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s African Trade Policy Centre has commissioned a SEA for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

b) Rwanda is instituting SEA as a strategic tool to mainstream environment and climate change proofing across all sectors. Its SEA of the National Land Use and Development Master Plan 2020-2050 is ongoing. It is part of a Green Climate Fund project on national adaptation planning and readiness support.

The Explanatory Memorandum of the Environment Bill stipulates that it is repealing the EPA and replacing it with modern legislation, encompassing national policy, strategy and planning level. Hence concerning SEA, we expect the Environment Bill to show its modernity when compared to the existing EPA 2002. Unfortunately the Bill is left wanting for several reasons:

a) It is recalled that the EPA 2002 did have provision for Strategic EIA and it included a specific Schedule for undertakings that required a SEA. And the National Physical Development Plan (NPDP) was included in the list of scheduled undertakings requiring a SEA. (3)

● In fact, before SEA was removed from EPA 2002, the following SEA studies were carried out:

● (i) The Identification of Potential Sites for Marinas, Ski Lanes and Bathing Areas for Mauritius in 2005.

● (ii) The Multi-annual Adaptation Strategy (MAAS) on the reform of the sugar sector (2006-2015) as required by European Union, the funding agency; it is noted that in EU jurisdiction, a SEA is mandatory for policies, plans and programmes (EU Directive 2001/42/EC). The EU Directive gives directives for the conduct of SEA within the European Union.

● (iii) The National Development Strategy (2003) underwent a Strategic Environmental Appraisal “consistent with international norms and standards” to “ensure that it promotes the philosophy of environmentally sustainable development.”(4)

We have seen how the lack of Strategic Environmental Assessment has had severe impacts on policies and strategies for sectors such as Land Development, Solid Wastes, Energy, Land Transport, Aquaculture (the fate of the Growfish project is a case in point), to name a few.

Hence, we are appalled that despite the purported policy and planning scope of the Environment Bill, the list of undertakings requiring a SEA as per its proposed Sixth Schedule is highly selective and restrictive.

To name a few of the policies and strategies that should be tested under a SEA:

(a) The National Development Strategy, expired in 2020 and still under review, is not included, nor are the various hospitality and property development schemes of the Economic Development Board.

● This apex SEA is critical to addressing the interlinked challenges posed by pollution, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and conservation of biodiversity. Without this linchpin, cascading sectoral and area-based SEAs involving land and sea use will be, at best, ineffective and at worst, incoherent with conflicting and perverse outcomes. In effect Strategic Environmental Assessment is absent in the very overarching sphere where it is meant to be located.

(b) Deep sea exploration and mining in our maritime zones with its vast EEZs is another excluded policy area with highly negative environmental and ecological impacts. An EIA, being project and site-specific cannot be used to assess an individual “deep sea exploration and mining” project if the full implications of the activity as a policy decision have not first been evaluated through a SEA.

On the other hand, we are at a loss to understand some of what is included. For instance, why does “Restoration of large and important ESAs” under the “Environmentally Sensitive Area” sector (sic) find itself in the proposed scheduled list of undertakings specifically requiring a SEA?

If what is proposed in a new environmental legislation is approved, these serious flaws will not only make SEAs ineffective and useless but may also result in more harm than good to the environment and its inevitable economic and social repercussions, detracting from its purported sustainable development objective.

Such a flawed understanding and consequent continuing legislative and institutional gaps – which the Environment Bill needs to minimise - also jeopardises the credibility of national efforts to develop capacities to independently access the range of climate finance funds – specially adaptation - and to mobilise the resources much needed for meeting the Nationally Determined Contributions of the UNfCC as well as the Sustainable Development Goals.

We contend, Sirs, that this is not the forward-looking, legislative legacy the present government wishes to leave through this new Environment Bill.

We have not been able to give our views on the Environment Bill earlier as PML was not invited to the validation consultative workshop on the review of the EPA 2002 held in February 2022. It is most regrettable that there has not been an inclusive validation process where our views could have been heard prior to the Bill being sent to the National Assembly.

We are in the process of completing further comments and concerns we have on this Bill. But we have chosen to write this open letter for all the reasons given above because of these fundamental flaws identified with the Strategic Environmental Assessment component of this Bill, and before it passes further steps in the National Assembly.

Yours truly,

Adi Teelock

For Platform Moris Lanvironnman

(3) First Schedule (Section 15 (2)) PART 3: Housing Development Programme; Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Industrial estates, Land and transport management plan; National Physical 13 Development Plan (NPDP); New town and satellite town; Port master plan; Sewage master plan; Solid waste management plan; Tourism development plans for Mauritius and Rodrigues.

(4) National Development Strategy, Volume 2, Appendix 2, 2003