New territory in environmental protection: James Curran interview

Chief Executive of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency Professor James Curran outlines new thinking on the polluter pays principle and urban air pollution to Stephen Dineen.

As the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) consults on a new funding system, James Curran believes that the time has come for a re-think on who pays. In its current consultation on streamlining 14 charging schemes into one, the agency proposes a shift away from the polluter pays principle to one in which the user pays. “At the very least it’s a concept worth thinking about,” he tells eolas.

Under the current model, if a business is paying for a licence, the agency must be able to “demonstrate very, very accurately that we’re undertaking activities to monitor their licence, equivalent and appropriate to a charge raised against them,” says Curran.

“That all sounds very accountable and so on, but it totally removes flexibility and, frankly, it may mean we’re devoting time and effort to monitor the licence of a business that is perfectly compliant.” This monitoring occurs “yet there are other completely criminal activities going on that we’re not paid to look at.”

The consultation document on future funding arrangements states: “Businesses can cause harm to the environment by use of these resources or degrading of these services, and so their use requires an environmental protection system to ensure they are managed effectively for current and future generations.” The ‘use of environmental resources’ principle, it states, should form the basis for designing and implementing future protection systems and associated costs.

“There are many companies both here and in Scotland that trade absolutely on our wild environment in terms of walking or fishing or hiking,” he illustrates. “Those companies currently don’t contribute anything to the protection of those ecosystem services on which they’re trading.” Companies should look on an environmental protection fee as “an insurance premium to protect the ecosystem services that their business depends on.”

A further element, says Curran, is a reduction in licence fees “if you’re a high performing business and you’re complying and indeed going beyond compliance.” For companies requiring the agency to “actually put more effort into monitoring you and chasing you,” the licence fee should be higher.

“What I’m not peddling here is that as an agency we want to increase our income or expand or grow; that’s not it at all,” he counters. “It’s actually about trying to determine where the responsibility for environmental protection should lie and involving those businesses and individuals in the whole process.”

Harms-based approach

Another new way of thinking for SEPA is an annual identification of serious harms perpetrated on the environment and working with other organisations to combat them. “So both last year and this year, we’ve identified criminal operations in the waste sector as a harm that we want to tackle,” he explains. Through combined and targeted operations with the police and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, SEPA is succeeding in bringing about successful prosecutions. The perpetrators are “potentially involved in other criminal activities as well,” he adds. “The fact that we can intervene and generate the evidence within environmental crime is actually by default clearing up other criminal activities that aren’t our responsibility.”

For Curran, the biggest danger facing SEPA and all environment protection agencies is climate change. At a time when a “degree of scepticism” has declined, there is little “credible ambition to do anything about it,” he says.

“We probably already have lost the battle to limit climate change to 2 degrees Centigrade,” he admits. “That is dangerous territory.” Scotland’s environment agency is facing “quite a bit of public interest” in marine fish farming and radioactive sites.

“These are legacy sites from typically the years after the Second World War when amounts of radium and so on were disposed at old airfields,” Curran says of the radioactive sites. The public “quite rightly get very concerned about radioactive contamination” and efforts are now being made to clean up the sites.

The agency, along with many across Europe, is concerned with urban air quality. “It’s not easy to tackle,” he explains. With 13,000 premature deaths in the UK due to air pollution in 2005 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), Curran believes that it “is the one pollution that’s killing people but I don’t think people who are exposed to those levels of pollution in city areas are aware of that.”

It is only through education that “local communities can begin to understand those links, begin to understand their own local ambient air quality,” he says, giving them confidence and empowerment “to go to their local authorities and say: ‘Can we do something about this?’”

“At the moment, I think there’s very little pressure on local authorities to act on this; it’s not a vote winner.” Solutions centre “generally around green infrastructure for communities, sustainable public transport.” These benefits create “better places to live, and therefore attract inward investment and eventually generate economic growth,” he says. “So I think it is again one of those areas where there are multiple benefits [that] potentially spin out of tackling an environmental harm.”

Fracking: another ‘nuclear’ issue

“There’s a lot of public concern around fracking,” says Curran of Scottish public opinion. SEPA is currently analysing the impact of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas “and other unconventional gas and oil processes.” From the analysis that SEPA has done, Curran believes that “as with most things” if the technology is used “appropriately and carefully, and monitored, then there should be no problems.” While Scotland does not appear to have significant shale gas reserves, there is a danger that the debate “becomes another kind of nuclear issue, with very polarised views on it, many of which are more emotional than evidence-based.”

Problems have occurred through fracking in other countries, he admits, citing the dangers of contaminated public drinking water in Bulgaria; the Balkan state banned fracking for shale gas in January. “We want to gather the evidence, gather the experience and make the right technical decisions about how we should manage it,” he says, “and indeed, on the basis of that, make a decision nationally about whether we want to use this as a resource.”