Study finds lack of information on land reclamation

A Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) on the new Spatial Planning and Environment Plan (SPED), which is set to replace the Malta’s planning ‘bible’ – the Structure Plan – only includes three brief references to the government’s land reclamation plans, and states that their impact is uncertain due to the lack of information on the sites currently earmarked for this project.

A ‘SEA’ is required for any published plan which has an impact on the environment.

But the government has so far refused to conduct a specific plan on coastal development, arguing that this issue should be addressed in the SPED, a document that will set the country’s planning policies and priorities.

If approved, the SPED – as amended by the present government – would enshrine land reclamation as one of many policies in the overall plan, without a specific SEA on land reclamation.

In this way, all applications for land reclamation would have to be assessed according to the SPED, even though individual land reclamation projects would still require an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA).

One of the SPED’s objectives is to set guidelines for the development of the coast and land reclamation “to further socio-economic development”.

The government has so far resisted calls by environmental NGOs and planning ombudsman David Pace, for a separate plan to regulate coastal development, insisting that the policy would be regulated by the SPED, whose impact has now been assessed in the Strategic Environment Assessment.

Of the two shortcomings noted by the SEA, these include the negative impact on water resources and landscape aesthetics, while also passing an observation on renewable energy,

The SEA said that the negative impact on water resources was unclear “due to lack of information related to the scale and location of land reclamation projects.”

It said the impact on the landscape was “uncertain”, but that a positive aspect of land reclamation was the “potential to facilitate renewable energy infrastructure”.

Land reclamation committee

A government committee chaired by architect Duncan Mifsud is presently assessing 21 land reclamation proposals.

In September, MEPA shot down a recommendation by planning ombudsman David Pace for a specific policy regulating the development of the coast and surrounding seas.

Accepting this proposal would have ensured that any land reclamation project would be individually subjected to both an EIA, and a SEA as required by EU law. This would then have allowed interested developers to have “a clear indication whether his proposal could be favourably approved,” Pace said.

But MEPA said land reclamation should be considered as a policy among others in the SPED.

A study conducted by British experts Scott Wilson published in 2011 had estimated that the costs for land reclamation in the two most viable sites as being between €42 million to €546 million, leading it to conclude that that other measures should be considered “to reduce the size of the construction waste stream, before embarking on such as high cost project”.