JAMAICA’S environmental laws were this week criticised as being weak – lacking proper structures for enforcement as well as not having strong enough penalties to be prohibitive – and in need of reform.

“The clearest indication of the ineffectiveness of our environmental laws is the state of the environment. We have a serious solid waste problem, a range of air quality issues such as industrial pollution, open burning and motor vehicle emissions,” said environmentalist Diana McCaulay, at a panel discussion put on by the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and the Norman Manley Law school on Monday.

She received support from environmentalist Peter Espeut who argued that in too many cases there were overlaps between laws and too many hindrances to implementation.

‘For example there was one case where a game warden caught someone with a turtle. The case went to court and when it came up the judge asked under what act the offence fell. When he was told the Wildlife Protection Act, he asked for a copy because he was not familiar with it,” said Espeut. “But the clerk of court could not find one so the game warden had to go home and get his to lend to the judge. So sometimes the environmental laws are not as well known in the courts.”

Espeut added that the small fines of some of the offences would not deter people from breaching environmental laws.

“It would be good to take the environmental laws and rationalise them,” he said.

Espeut also hit out at the use of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the way that they were being done in Jamaica. EIAs ensure that the environmental implications of decisions are taken into account before the decisions for projects are made.

“The law does not define the context of an EIA. So a developer pays a consultant to do an EIA but chances are the consultant won’t be truthful about the impact of the assessment,”

“The consultant might reason that if I don’t recommend that this project goes through, then I won’t get paid and other firms won’t hear about me so there is a conflict of interest. I have never heard of an EIA which says the project must not go ahead,” he added.

He stressed that structures should be put in place to remove conflicts of interest.

“You can’t have a consultant having a stake in a development and also doing the EIA for that development. That is a conflict of interest. Corruption is too often the result of this gap in environmental laws,” he said.

NEPA’s manager of legal services, Carol Excell, said her organisation was aware of some of the criticisms and was looking at ways to deal with the issue.

“There are positive things happening such as new acts like the Forestry Act.. But we do acknowledge that in a lot of the areas the penalties are not enough to be prohibitive,” said Excell, who was also a panelist. “There are issues with compliance and implementation of most laws in Jamaica, not just environment. but there are some fundamental issues with some of the (environmental) Acts.”