By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A Cabinet Minister yesterday said some persons are guilty of “faulty logic” in seeking to apply Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) regulations retroactively to existing subdivisions or developments.

Romauld Ferreira, minister of the environment and housing, told a webinar organised by the Bahamas Engineers, Architects and Allied Professionals (BEAAP) that there was an increasing practice where persons were interpreting the EIA regulations too strictly and applying them to matters that they do not cover.

Mr Ferreira said: “There are elements of which this environmental law does not apply. I want to be very direct and clear here. There are elements that this law, the EIA regulations, do not speak to that are currently being applied and they ought not to be applied.”

The issue was arising when Bahamians want to buy a lot within an “existing or scattered subdivision”, he revealed. “The Ministry of the Environment has no business in a transaction like that. The Environmental Impact Assessment regulations were never ever intended to speak to that.

“The application of those regulations to that is wrong in law, wrong in the spirit in which the law was given, and is creating unnecessary hardship for existing subdivisions.”

The minister said there was no requirement for a subdivision that already exists to conduct an EIA, adding that the application of a new planning tool to an existing subdivision was “faulty logic”. He sought to make it “abundantly clear” that EIAs should not be applied to existing subdivisions.

Mr Ferreira said: “This is why I’m referencing the rigid adherence to rules and, on the flip-side, an over aggressive developer and how we are to try to seek harmony. We don’t have the resources to police and balance in the moral ethics of environment, whether it’s a good development or a bad development, if the works has already been done.”

Rochelle Newbold, director of the Department of Environmental Planning and Protection (DEPP), said: “We have to learn that biodiversity is your friend and not your enemy.

“We need to get away from this culture of mass clearing, because as individuals, when we buy a piece of property, we look at the property, we can hear the birds and we see the greenery and then we immediately seek to go in and have it all mowed down because, apparently, it’s not important or it in some way contrasts to what we want to use the land for.

“But it is in fact what actually attracted us to the property. So the biodiversity is our friend, and as much of the natural biodiversity that we can maintain on the property is an indication of the sustainable use of that property.”

Mr Ferreira also said: “You have two sides of the equation that the government is trying to balance because, at the end of the day, if we don’t balance it there can be no economic progress; certainly at the rate that we want.

“This is a new department, these are new regulations. There are many aspects that we are working on to make this thing flow smoother, and to make sure that we understand and appreciate as a government and, certainly as a department and a ministry, the pace of business. Developers have rights just as much as the citizens of The Bahamas have rights, and balancing those rights and providing equal opportunities for all that we hope to move forward.”