General guidance for protecting marine environment from land-based activities

Abstract

This work aims at providing general patterns and “indicators” on how to address marine pollution from land-based activities into national legislation, with emphasis on national programmes of action for the protection of the marine environment from land-based activities (NPAs), and within the area of physical alteration and destruction of habitats (PADH) - on tourism and municipal wastewater management. To the light of the lessons-learnt for some years now and having due regard of numerous examples of legislative provisions and jurisprudence coming from develop and underdeveloped countries located in different regions, the substance of the document is focused on the translation of the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities (GPA) various principles - as well as GPA-related legislative instruments, including innovative financial measures, compliance and enforcement mechanisms -, into specific regulations and jurisprudence. To better visualize this approach, the document examines provisions that has been yet integrated GPA principles into relevant national legislation and/or court cases. If national laws and regulations provide additional mechanisms to improve the preservation of the marine environment, a logical natural development to further advance the implementation of the GPA is to encourage the integration of the GPA principles into legislative frameworks at the national level. Nevertheless, experience around the world has demonstrated that the sole translation of the GPA principles into domestic rules is not suffice by itself to achieve the purports of the global programme if this first step is not followed by a process of strict surveillance of its execution. Therefore, as legal compliance and enforcement should be seen as the weakest points in the environmental-protection programmes adopted by governments, the national legal implementation of general GPA principles also needs to develop a correlative and adaptive programme of action to check regularly both the effective control of their observance, and their concrete application by judges into environmental related-sentences. In this regard, the present book provides vital information so as to generate the governments’ commitment and awareness on the need for action on land-based sources of pollution at international, regional and national levels from an integrated environmental management approaches, strategies and processes. The guidance is intended to be used in a cross-sectoral and holistic manner by decision-makers, parliamentarians, law practitioners, private sectors, local and indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, and the judiciary in order to promote the implementation of the GPA to make environmental results tangible.