April 3, 1998
Environment ministers of the leading industrial countries agreed here Thursday to phase out subsidies to agriculture and other sectors which cause pollution, but gave no time frame.
The ministers of the 29-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development also said that environmental as well as economic performance should be measured and taken into account when assessing a country's growth and development.
OECD countries account for a fifth of the world's population, but more than half of total world energy use and global carbon dioxide emissions, according to OECD figures.
EU Commissioner for the Environment Ritt Bjerregaard welcomed the environmental indicators idea, saying it marked a "change in the perspective of the OECD" from a purely economic focus.
The environment ministers also agreed after a two-day meeting here that the OECD members will give a high priority to ratifying and implementing the Kyoto protocol, agreed in December, on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said to be responsible for the global warming effect.
But they failed to find common ground on the need for a fuel tax on the fast-growing aviation sector in a bid to offset the environmental costs.
Ministers agreed to ensure that "prices of natural resources as far as possible reflect the rue environmental and social costs of production, consumption and scarcity, in particular by gradually phasing out environmentally damaging subsidies," the final communique from the meeting said.
It gave no time frame for phasing out such subsidies, but Austrian Environment Minister Martin Bartenstein said the commitment to do so in itself marked an important step forward.
"Most governments are not even aware of what subsidies there are and which of them are environmentally damaging" and they are now committed to addressing the problem, he said.
The ministers also agreed to give "particular priority to ratification and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol" in a way that paves the way for further progress in limiting global emissions.
Senior Japanese environment official Kazu Takemoto said this meeting did not make any specific progress on details of implementing the Kyoto agreement, but did offer a good chance for an exchange of views.
The environment ministers asked OECD experts to develop and adopt "a comprehensive set of robust indicators to measure progress towards sustainable development" in environmental terms, so that these figures could be included in regular OECD reports on a country's performance.
Officials said that several ways of gathering such information already exist, but the OECD will have to select key indicators and ways to measure them. No time frame was given for starting to use the indicators in reports.
On the thorny issue of fuel taxes, the communique simply said the OECD should "continue to study the feasibility of introducing regulatory or fiscal measures in high growth transport sectors, such as aviation," in collaboration with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
Bartenstein, the deputy chairman of the meeting, acknowledged that this was a rather "weak" formula, but said this was all the ministers were able to agree on.
Several countries are against imposing a tax on aviation fuel, but Bartenstein said Friday's agreement that the OECD will examine the issue is an advance on the previous situation, where OECD ministers had simply referred the whole issue to the ICAO.
"The step could have been bigger in my opinion, but it is a step in the right direction," he said.
New Zealand Environment Minister Simon Upton, who chaired the Paris meeting, said that because the whole climate change problem is extremely complex, organisations such as the OECD cannot make rapid progress.
But there is "a growing realisation that these issues are not going to go away" and that something must be done, he said.
The G8 ministers -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- went straight from France to England, where they will meet separately to discuss environmental issues further in Leeds Castle until Sunday.
Shared Goals
Ministers agree on the following goals as an expression of their commitment to action to implement sustainable development:
...ensuring that prices of natural resources as far as possible reflect the true environmental and social costs of production, consumption and scarcity, in particular by gradually phasing-out environmentally damaging subsidies and tax breaks, and, as far as possible, by the "greening" of tax systems, through integrating environmental concerns into their design...
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