The work of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety
The Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, or Environment Committee for short, is one of the Bundestag's permanent committees, which it set up at the beginning of the current 15th electoral term to prepare its deliberations. The committees of the Bundestag are charged with preparing its deliberations and decisions. This means that they are tasked with providing certain recommendations for decisions on the substantive aspects of the items of business referred to them. They may also, however, take up further issues falling within their terms of reference.
The area of responsibility of the Environment Committee reflects the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. It is thus the committee responsible for deliberating on items of business tabled in the Bundestag from the field of environmental policy and certain areas of energy policy concerning renewable sources of energy. These include draft laws and ordinances, motions tabled by the parliamentary groups, reports by the Federal Government and the European Parliament and draft directives and regulations issued by the European Commission. The Environment Committee submits to the plenary of the Bundestag a recommendation for a decision on each of the items referred to it as the committee responsible. This is accompanied by a report which includes a section on the course of the deliberations in the committee, including the positions of the minority parliamentary groups.
Items of business for which other committees have main responsibility, but which have an environmental policy angle, can be referred to the Environment Committee as a committee asked for an opinion. In such cases, the Environment Committee's opinion is passed on to the committee responsible. The Environment Committee may also, in consultation with the committee responsible, submit expert opinions on items not referred to it.
Items for which the Environment Committee is the committee responsible include the regular reports presented by the Federal Government on important and problematic areas of environmental policy. This encompasses, for example, the environmental report (every four years), the report on measures to reduce CFC emissions at international, EU and national level (at irregular intervals, depending on new developments), the report on environmental radioactivity and exposure to radiation (once a year), the report on soil conservation (once per electoral term) and the report on the national sustainability strategy (once every two years).
The reports published by the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) and the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) are also submitted to the Environment Committee as printed papers, together with an opinion from the Federal Government.
As a rule, the meetings of the Environment Committee are closed to the public, but it may decide to admit the public to individual meetings. This is particularly the case for hearings, where experts and other individuals give information on a particular subject.
In the current 15th electoral term the Committee has 33 members. In principle, its composition reflects the relative strengths of the different parliamentary groups in the plenary. The Committee Chairman belongs to the SPD parliamentary group, whilst his deputy is from the CDU/CSU.
During the 14th electoral term, the Environment Committee held 88 meetings, of which nine were public hearings; it dealt in particular with climate protection, the revision of the Federal Nature Conservation Act, the amendment of the Atomic Energy Act, ending the use of nuclear energy, and with individual aspects of waste law. The deliberations on climate protection policy focused in particular on the Kyoto Protocol and its transposition into national law. In the area of waste law, ordinances on the disposal of waste oil, the disposal of municipal waste and on the amendment of the Packaging Ordinance were amongst the items referred to the Environment committee as the committee responsible. A large proportion of the items referred to the Environment Committee were concerned with the transposition of European directives into national law. These included a draft law implementing the amending directive to the EIA Directive, draft laws implementing the ICPP Directive and other EC directives, the Draft Biocides Act, draft laws amending the Federal Water Act, the Federal Immission Control Act and the Environmental Audit Act and the Draft Act on the Disposal of End-of-Life Vehicles. During the 14th electoral term, the Environment Committee regularly requested verbal or written information from the Federal Government on the issues to be deliberated on. As the Committee's request, it was kept up to date on the work of the EU Environment Council, receiving briefings both before and after Council meetings.
As in the previous electoral term, the concept of sustainable development will continue to be the guiding principle of environmental policy in the recently begun 15th electoral term. In their Coalition Agreement, the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary groups, which form the government, state their intention to continue the national climate protection programme in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol and the burden-sharing agreed upon within the EU, and to further develop the Renewable Energies Act and the promotion of renewable energies, with the aim of further increasing the contribution of renewable energies to electricity generation and primary energy consumption. They also stated their aim of introducing a procedure for choosing the site of a final nuclear waste disposal facility, amending the Atomic Energy Act to this end, of improving preventive flood prevention, developing a strategy to reduce the increasing use of land and reducing noise pollution, in particular that caused by air traffic.
The trend towards an increase in the significance of items of European origin will continue; over 40% of items referred to the Committee during the 14th legislative term fell into this category. The EU directive on emission trading, the further development of European chemical law, together with environmental law and nature protection law aspects of European Union enlargement will be major topics for the Committee during the 15th legislative term.
Sustainability requires the integration of ecological, economic and social interests. An environmental policy based on the principle of sustainability thus has to cut across a range of policy fields. It is especially at the interface between different areas of policy that it is faced with new challenges, issues and tasks.
The Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety can be contacted at the following e-mail address:
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