Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Tough new rules designed to protect Europe’s ecosystems from acid rain will
not apply to parts of Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, the areas
of the continent that have suffered the worst ravages of acid pollution.
Negotiators drawing up a treaty on acid rain decided at the end of last
month that it would cost too much to include them.

The negotiators are meeting to draft a UN agreement for further reductions
in emissions of sulphur dioxide, a prime cause of acid rain, which is
scheduled for signing before the end of November. Their original plan was to
reduce pollution the most where this will have the greatest ecological
benefit, rather than calling for more blanket reductions of emissions.

Earlier rounds of negotiations had agreed that damage from acid rain should
be reduced everywhere to half its present level. This was to be done by
calculating the ‘critical load’ of acid that each ecosystem could absorb
without suffering damage and then aiming to reduce by 50 per cent the gap
between that and the levels of acid fallout in 1980, the base year for the
calculations.

But scientists and civil servants from 24 nations retreated from these
targets during talks in Geneva last month. They dropped the ’50 per cent
gap reduction’ formula for 11 zones with the most damaged soils, forests and
lakes. The zones cover 250 000 square kilometres in all, an area equal to
that of the entire United Kingdom.

‘These very sensitive areas were totally dominating our calculations,’ says
one scientist involved. The negotiators, he says, decided that as much
overall good could be done at a lesser cost by intro-ducing more relaxed
targets for the most sensitive areas, but slightly more protection for the
rest of the continent. The remainder of Europe is now promised a 60 per cent
gap reduction.

The change in the formula was first proposed in March by Norway. In April,
Britain’s then environment secretary, Michael Howard, argued in a letter to
Labour MP Tam Dalyell that the areas proposed for removal from the formula
were those ‘where the critical load would be likely to be exceeded by acid
depositions of natural origin even if man-made emissions were completely
eliminated’. This ‘natural’ deposition is understood to refer to all acid
that has not yet been attributed to any single nation’s emissions.

If approved later this year, the targets could come into force by the year
2000 in Western Europe and 2005 in the east. However, some nations,
including Britain, only accept them ‘as a basis for negotiations’.

Howard described the target as ‘over-ambitious’ because ‘great expenses
could be incurred in fitting abatement equipment to plant which would . . .
be replaced within a few years by new clean technology’.

The revised targets substantially reduce the cuts Britain would be asked to
make under the new treaty – to 21 per cent of 1980 levels, rather than 11
per cent (This Week, 13 March). This is because British emissions are a
major source of the acid rain that falls on the vulnerable areas of Norway
that have been removed from the targets.

Britain is the main financial beneficiary of the new formula. Negotiators
calculate that Britain’s annual bill for meeting the revised target would be
£760 million, down from around £1170
million under the previous formula.

Other beneficiaries from the new formula include France, Finland and
Ukraine. The losers include Italy and Spain.