Anniversaries have a habit of making me reflective. April 2004 marks several important ones for me. It is SEPA’s eighth birthday, the third anniversary of my joining SEPA, and it’s exactly one year since I became Chief Executive. So I find myself reflecting on (to paraphrase the late, lamented Douglas Adams) life, the environment and everything.

I find two questions keep recurring: whose responsibility is ‘the environment’, and how much does ‘the environment’ cost? To begin with the latter: we are currently engaged in strenuous debate about the resources needed to ensure the environment is protected and improved, and about who should pay. Taxpayers rightly expect us to get best value for every penny we spend of their money. Business and industry rightly expect the charges we levy on them to be reasonable and fair. I must vigorously prioritise what we need to do and how we will devote our available resources to doing it.

But I wonder if, rather than thinking about what the environment costs, we as a society devote enough time to asking what it is worth? Not only does it have considerable intrinsic value, a clean, healthy environment also contributes to the nation’s health and to the health of the economy.

Flicking through the contents of this SEPA View reinforced my views. For instance, implicit in articles on waste strategies in Scotland and in Ireland are the economic and social problems caused by poor and illegal practices. Fly tipping blights the countryside, costs millions to clean up and wastes materials that might otherwise have been reused or recycled.

Whose responsibility is it to deal with environmental problems? SEPA obviously takes a leading role but, as several articles on the theme of education indicate, everyone has to play their part. This is a global problem and initiatives like World Environment Day and the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development represent international efforts to inspire people to take action.

SEPA, as Scotland’s environmental regulator, must use the ‘carrot’ of education as well as the ‘stick’ of regulation to persuade others to take responsibility for protecting and improving the environment. Ultimately, Scotland has nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting a proper value on its environment.


Campbell Gemmell

SEPA Chief Executive



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