Daily Star - Officials Call For Prioritizing Environment

NABATIEH: Global warming could have disastrous effects on Lebanon if the country does not act quickly to improve its ecological balance, officials have warned. The warning was issued Friday at a news conference in Nabatieh, hosted by the Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Lebanon Laurent Fabier.
The conference, which was held in the city’s Kamal Jaber Center, was the final event of a day that had seen some first steps toward making Lebanon a more environmentally responsible country.
Together with Mohammad Fneish, the minister of state for administrative reform, Danish Ambassador Jan Top Christensen and the Environment Ministry’s General Director Berj Hadjian, the EU’s top diplomat in Lebanon inaugurated two of OMSAR’s EU-funded projects in southern Lebanon.
In Abbassieh, the officials opened a sterilization center for medical waste, which will allow the neighboring hospitals and medical centers to dispose of their waste in an environmentally friendly way.
“Before, the hospitals and health centers just threw their contaminated waste in the normal trash,” Fardon Abdullah, the city’s mayor, told The Daily Star.
“This is very harmful to the ground water and to public health.”
The new facility, which is equipped with a steam boiler that sterilizes the waste, was officially handed over to the municipality of Abbassieh at the ceremony. “This is one of the first projects of this kind in the south of Lebanon,” the mayor said. “It will help make the country cleaner.”
In Ansar, the delegation inaugurated a solid waste sorting and composting facility that turns the biodegradable elements of household litter into agriculturally exploitable compost. The other garbage will then be sold to recycling factories, with the goal of making the facility not only useful but also profitable to the municipality.
These two are the first of 11 similar projects that are being finalized all over Lebanon. Together, they form a solid waste investment program managed by OMSAR with a total budget of 14.2 million euros, funded by a grant from the European Union. Peter Christiaens, the EU Delegation’s program manager, explained that in 2004, a call for project proposals was made public throughout Lebanese municipalities, and of the 75 received projects, 17 of which were selected for financing.
“The funds are allocated in a way that each facility is financed for one to two years,” he elaborated. “After that, the municipalities take over.”
An important reason for letting local government officials themselves identify which project they needed most was to ensure that they would be sustained even after the funding stopped. As Patrick Laurent put it, “they have to be used, and they have to be made sustainable.”
However, it was pointed out by several of the speakers that the central government authorities in Beirut simply can’t afford to sort the totality of the country’s garbage, and that the goal of a sound waste management can only be achieved with the help of the citizens.
“It is important to raise real awareness in the citizens,” Laurent said. “Even if it is painful and embarrassing, we have to sort our trash.”
And as Fneish put it succinctly: “We need to change our behavior in order to protect the environment.”
The whole initiative is thus accompanied by an awareness campaign, aimed at tackling the problem at the source. In Ansar, this was demonstrated by the local schoolchildren, who bore cardboard signs on their chests that promoted the sorting of waste.
OMSAR’s efforts alone will not be able to solve the pollution problem in Lebanon, however. As Fneish pointed out, “Lebanese households produce 4,000 tons of solid waste a day. At the moment, the capacity of our facilities is only 700 tons, around 20 percent of that amount.”
In order to improve this dire situation, Fneish called for the creation of an ad hoc commission, coordinating the efforts of the Interior Ministry, the Environment Ministry, the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) and his office, with the goal of creating a national waste management plan.
OMSAR’s project manager, Roula Kabbani, explained that “we need a nationwide waste management policy. We have a master plan, but it has to be approved by the Cabinet. However, till now, no serious steps have been taken.”
One reason for this might be that the ministries concerned find themselves unable to deal with these issues. According to Fneish, “OMSAR did this because no other administration was able to take care of it.”
Unlike OMSAR, whose staff is mainly paid by the UNDP, the Environment Ministry is notoriously understaffed and has little in the way of executive powers.
“When we hand out funds, we prefer giving them to OMSAR,” Peter Christiaens said. “Although the European Union is one of the few bodies that try to work with and through government agencies, we feel that the Ministry of Environment is often not capable of acting effectively.”
The projects come at a time when Lebanon can in no way afford to take environmental issues lightly. At the conference in Nabatieh, Christiaens said that the country would be among the most heavily afflicted by global warming, resulting in less rainfall, less drinking water, desertification and rising sea levels.
In his speech, Minister Fneish called for “a rationalization of resources” in order to counter these effects. “We need to resort to renewable energies,” he urged. “This requires a national program – possibly dams, we might need a reforestation plan, and we need to fight forest fires.”
Hadjian pointed out that nature was not man’s property, and that man was in fact the only species that could not live in balance with his ecosystem, he chose not to elaborate on any counteractive measures the ministry might be planning to take.
The officials said Lebanese should be aware that the impact of the ecological crisis on their country will be devastating, unless action is taken immediately. As Patrick Laurent put it: “Now is the time to act.”