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Romania’s Road to Accession - The Need for an Environmental Focus

7. Conclusions and Perspectives

The countdown towards accession started when the European Council in Copenhagen decided in December 2002 that ten new members should be granted EU membership in May 2004. The current Greek Presidency expects to host the signing of the Accession Treaties, on 16 April 2003 at the Acropolis in Athens.

For Romania and Bulgaria, the candidate countries pegged for the second wave of enlargement in 2007, the European Commission proposed in November 2002 a new roadmap for their progress towards achieving accession. The Copenhagen Council provided for new dynamism in the enlargement: it committed to continue the pace of accession negotiations on all remaining chapters, and allocated additional financial assistance with respect to enlargement, depending on absorption capacity. The European Commission is in the meantime drawing up additional plans for continuing pre- and post-accession support in the environment sector.

With the target date of accession in 2007, Romania has a few more years to meet the challenge of transforming its environmental management system to conform to the standards now prevalent in Western Europe. It is now well advanced in its process of adapting its legal system to transpose the EU obligations in the environment sector and is likely to meet its goal of full transposition of all EU requirements as of 2000, by the end of this coming year (2003).

But there is concern that the efforts of the Ministry of Waters and Environmental Protection (MWEP) to complete legal transposition are out-pacing its capacity to set in place the necessary administrative structures and systems to achieve implementation. In certain sectors, it may be advisable to slow down the process of transposition, until enough practical experience is gained to determine the best regulatory approach for Romania and to ensure sufficient capacity especially among environmental officials at local level. For example, the challenge of introducing integrated permitting to almost 2000 facilities will require local permitting officials to develop new skills in evaluating whether a particular industrial facility has set in place the appropriate measures to comply with the EU standard of best available techniques (BAT) for that industrial sector.

The human and technical resources available at central and local levels for environmental management are severely constrained. The MWEP has requested additional budget for the staff it needs, but there are delays in getting approval for these additional resources. This will be a difficult issue to resolve, since the Romanian government is under great fiscal pressure. But if Romania is to move forward with EU accession, it will need to demonstrate compliance with the EU environmental requirements, including the capacity to administer these requirements, and the additional budgetary resources will need to be made available to the MWEP.

Another major challenge will be to support the many municipalities throughout Romania that will need to invest in construction and upgrading of infrastructure for drinking water supply, sewerage and waste water treatment, and solid waste management.

The MWEP has not yet been able to carry out the long-term financial planning necessary to show the EU how it will meet the EU investment-heavy requirements including for municipal infrastructure within the requested transition periods. There has been and continues to be significant technical assistance in this area, including Phare twinning, but the MWEP is finding it difficult to make some of the policy decisions needed to set investment priorities and the necessary financial planning is delayed. One of the immediate challenges will be to prepare adequate Directive-specific implementation plans and financing strategies for those EU requirements where transition periods have been requested, so that Romania can achieve provisional closure of the Environment Chapter.

In the absence of reliable cost estimate information, it is difficult to predict just how much additional funding Romanian municipalities will need to achieve EU compliance. But it is a matter of concern that Romania is already experiencing problems in being able to put forward sufficiently well-prepared projects to avail of the EU grant funding available. The amount of EU grant funding is expected to dramatically expand for both Romania and Bulgaria between 2004 and 2006, rising by an additional 20% in 2004, 30% in 2005 and 40% in 2006 compared to the average assistance received in the period 2001-2003. The actual amount of funding will however depend on the absorption capacity of each country, as well as the specific needs.

Romania expects to rely heavily on the EU grant funding in order to finance the environmental infrastructure it needs. But the experience of the first two years of the ISPA programme indicates that the Romanian institutions are not yet able to carry out the technical tasks of project preparation without additional support. Part of the problem rests with the technically demanding and rather rigid requirements of the EU for its grant funding. The assistance provided by Denmark and other bilateral donors has been very important in helping Romania to prepare its projects to qualify for the EU grant support. It is likely to need continued bilateral assistance – both technical assistance and co-financing support – for years to come to meet its investment challenge.

For Romania, the effort to comply with the EU environmental requirements will bring significant benefits including reduced mortality, lower incidents of diseases, and lower damages to buildings and crops. These benefits are estimated at between 1.27 and 9.8 billion EUR, the highest benefit amongst all the candidate countries expressed as a percentage of GDP (30.7%). FN Data extracted from the Benefits of Compliance with the Environmental Acquis for the Candidate Countries (ECOTEC, EFTEC, IEEP, Metroeconomica, THE and Candidate Country Experts, 2001).

Thus it will be important – not only for enlargement but for the humanitarian and environmental benefits that will come from compliance with the EU environmental standards – for Romania to continue its pre-accession efforts in this area. The EU and other donors will need to plan for provision of long-term technical assistance and financial support, if the EU objective of a high level of environmental protection is to be achieved throughout Romania.