Considerations on the Environmental Policies and Strategies of the European Union

Abstract

Abstract The protection of environmental factors, of the environment as a whole, is a major and ever more pressing issue, which should be of interest to all mankind, to all the states, and to all political and governmental decision factors. In this sense, at the level of the Member States of the European Union, it was necessary to draw and adopt coherent environmental policies and strategies, which would insure an effective protection of the natural and anthropological factors, on the medium and long term. Environmental quality is a matter of general, global interest, which requires achieving appropriate environmental policies, taking into account the essential connection between the world’s economy and the environment. The environmental policy is a method of organising, coordinating, and institutionalising the complex activity of protecting the environmental factors, meant to set the strategies, means, and their implementation techniques at a national, regional, and global level, with the purpose of insuring the preservation and development of the environment. Within the European Union, the opportunity to draw and adopt an environmental policy was determined by the problems that surged following the rapid extension of pollution, a phenomenon that does not stop at the borders of one state or of Europe. Thus, in a first instance, the general policy concerning the environmental protection within the European Union was formulated and defined, through the elaboration and implementation of the Environmental Action Programmes, following which the European Commission established the sectoral strategies in the field, starting from the Strategy for sorting waste and continuing with the EU Strategy for natural protection, the EU Strategy for air pollution, and the EU Strategy for water pollution. In the end, by adopting the Strategy for Sustainable Development, the environmental policy is permanently connected to the environmental issues that may appear, leading to new tendencies in the actions for environmental protection. The efficiency of environmental policies in the European Union is materialized through improvements in the issues related to air quality, surface water quality, through the dissemination and delimitation of fauna protection areas, but there are still many contexts in which such approaches should be intensified, such as: global warming, deterioration of piscicultural fauna, decline in biodiversity.