Ministry of Environment,Forests and Water Administration Albania

1. Ministry of Environment,Forests and Water Administration Albania ECENA Workshop on Benchmarking and Setting Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Indicators 29-30 March, 2007 Szentendre, Hungary

2. Indicators used in the country for benchmarking • No of inspections according priorities (small, medium, large activities)/inspector/year. • No of penalties/REA-s/year. • Value of collected fines/REA-s/year. • No of permit activities compared with No of activities without permit. • No of activities in compliance with environmental legislation. • No of enterprises investing in environmental field/abatements etc.

3. Analyses of indicators • Some analysis has been undertaken of these indicators over the years. For example: • No of inspections in 2006 compared with 2005 is increased in 19%, but the inspection is focused in small and medium enterprises and the quality of inspection is still low. • the penalties paid in 2006 represent 6 percent of all penalties, while for 2005 the figure is 20 percent. The efficient mechanism for their collection is not found yet. • No of permitted activities compared with No of activities without permit in 2006 against 2005 is increased with 3.1%, but the intention of REA-s has been in issuing permits for small activities. • No of activities in compliance with environmental legislation compared with them in non compliance is not yet measured. • No of enterprises (big installation) investing in the environmental field/abatements in 2006 compared with 2005 is increased. From 25 big installation 4 of them has investing in abatements, which is reflected in reduction of air emissions

4. Benchmarking • Benchmarking within the institution • The Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Water Administration and the Environmental Inspectorate do use neither benchmarking nor standard setting in environmental compliance and enforcement polices. Experience from other countries is taken into consideration but not used for comparing the standards. • Performance of the inspection work is rarely compared with similar performance in other counties. • The performance of civil servants is evaluated every year. In theory performance is linked to remuneration. Targets are fixed at three levels: ministerial, departmental and individual.

5. Progress Monitoring • Since 2003, Albania has started to report at the possible extent to the EEA priority Data Flow in a number of areas. • As most of the EC directives have not been transposed yet into the environmental legislation, no reporting is made yet at the EC. • Together with the other Western Balkan Countries, Albania has applied twice (2000; 2003) for membership to the EEA, but that has not been possible yet, since the country has not yet the proper capacities in terms of quality monitoring and reporting.

6. Progress Monitoring • Only during 2003-2004 Albania started reporting to the EEA data on: Inventory of GHGs (1994), CDDA (2003-2004), air quality (2001-2003, 2004, 2005), quality of rivers and lakes (2003-2005), quality of underground water (2003-2005), discharges into marine and river waters (2003-2005), etc. • Albania is also responsible to report to the secretariats of the different international conventions and agreements, to which it is a party.

7. Progress Monitoring • Albania has provided fact sheets for 12 out of 37 Core Set Indicators (CSI) of the EEA to be included in the Belgrade Report: • CSI 006 Production and consumption of ozone depleting substances • CSI 008 – Designated areas • CSI 014 Land take • CSI 016 Municipal waste generation • CSI 019 Oxygen consuming substances in rivers • CSI 020 Nutrients in freshwater • CSI 021 Nutrients in transitional, coastal and marine waters • CSI 023 Chlorophyll in transitional, coastal and marine waters • CSI 022 Bathing Water Quality • CSI 031 Renewable electricity • CSI 032 Status of Marine Fish Stocks • CSI 034 Fishing fleet capacity

8. Ministry of Environment,Forests and Water AdministrationAlbania Thank you