New report: The EU Governance Landscape For Zero Marine Pollution
The SOS-ZEROPOL2030 project launches its second report: The EU Governance Landscape for Zero Marine Pollution, proving an overview of the existing EU governance arrangements and the best practices and constraints of governance efforts to achieve zero pollution.
| December 18th, 2023 | News
This report is the second deliverable coming out of Work Package 2, which looks at the building blocks for zero pollution governance and provides an overview of Zero Pollution governance in the EU. The first report: The EU Zero Pollution Ambition was published in May 2023, and gains insight into the feasibility of the EUs environmental goals and stepping stones for governance of priority pollutants in European waters.
The EU Governance Landscape for Zero Marine Pollution report, led by Wageningen University & Research (WUR), will add to the first report and aims to identify the best practices and constraints of current EU governance efforts to achieve zero pollution for four selected priority pollutant groups: underwater noise, chemicals, nutrients and microplastics. The report focuses on land-based sources of emissions to the aquatic and marine environment, taking into account the production and use of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) and tyres.
By using the notion of governance arrangements, the report aims to answer what governance arrangements exist or are emerging that govern tyre wear particles (TWP) and PFAS generation and releases into the EU waterways, that ultimately reach the marine environment, as well identifying best practices and constraints for developing EU regulation to achieve zero pollution in EU waters.
Governance arrangements for zero pollution
For tyre wear particles (TWP) the report finds that five policy developments are taking place that will change the EU governance landscape for zero pollution:
- Euro 7 proposal to ban the most environmental harmful tyres
- Eco-design for tyres to reduce TWP abrasion
- Labelling of tyres to include a TWP abrasion rate
- Infill ban to reduce secondary TWPs
- Improved wastewater treatment to capture TWPs
For PFAS only one emerging governance arrangement was identified under the REACH restriction proposal for PFAS, addressing PFAS from upstream sources.
Best practices and constraints
The report identified best practice for achieving EU’s zero pollution objectives, which can be summarized into two: 1) the development of a life cycle perspective to address all life cycle stages of products that contribute to generating marine pollution emissions and 2) a source-based approach by targeting production and use as sources of contaminants, pollution can be prevented.
Some constraints that limit the chance of achieving zero pollution objectives for marine pollution are, lobbying by industry and product manufacturers, policy dependencies with the risk of contradictions or conflicts between EU regulations, continued and legacy pollutions and a lack of independent data.
Read the full report here: D2.2. The EU Governance Landscape for Zero Marine Pollution
Citation: Van Leeuwen, J., Van Hulst, F., Del Savio, L., Yeatman Omarsdottir, S., Miño, C. Hendriksen, A., Cowan, E., Boteler, B., Devriese, L. (2023) SOS-ZEROPOL2030: D2.2 The EU Governance Landscape for Zero Marine Pollution; Overview of the existing EU governance arrangements and the best practices and constraints of governance efforts to achieve zero marine pollution.
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