PML sent comprehensive comments, penned by PML member Nalini Burn, on the Environment Bill in May 2024 to the Ministry of Environment, Solid Waste Management and Climate Change. None of our concerns (nor of any other NGO as far as we know) were taken into consideration – the Minister commenting during readings of the Bill in the National Assembly that theses concerns had already been addressed in the Bill.
Opening paragraphs:
“This Environment Bill is neither innovative nor transformative. It is accommodating of a Business- As-Usual, technology-and-markets approach to the environment crises. It is so even when stuffed with a collection of “new” piecemeal measures, instruments and mechanisms, not all of which connect together coherently, in order then to build our resilience as a vulnerable Small Island Development State (SID).
The Bill claims to be modern. This is an empty catch phrase. The voluminous Bill is in fact full of loose and vague words. The Assises de l’Environnement had in early 2020 identified three main underlying causes, drivers of environmental degradation: an overriding focus on high income, high consumption-led, business- driven economic growth; a silo approach to governance and a top-down approach, marginalising local – especially deprived – communities and population groups. The efforts to remedy those through this bill are shallow and bound to be ineffectual with its highly narrow lens of what multi-stakeholder engagement means. The Bill is disturbingly silent on a bottom-up, citizen-centric approach. It betrays a reactive, authoritarian, opaque, closed government approach, so evident since the Covid pandemic crisis, then immediately followed by the Wakashio preventable catastrophe and more recent flash flood episodes.”
Our Open Letter to the the Prime Minister as Chairperson of the National Environment Commission and proposed Chairperson of the National Environment and Sustainable Development Commission and to the Minister of Environment, Solid Waste Management and Climate Change is annexed the document.
https://www.dropbox.com/home/Public%20PML?preview=Environment+Bill+Comments+PML+13+May+2024.pdf
Mauritius - Resilience an Rights 