Compendium reveals myth of development struggle

(CNS): The persistent complaint from the development lobby and their political supporters was exposed as a myth in the latest edition of the Compendium of Statistics published by the Economics and Statistics Office. The idea that developers are struggling to get things done because of the National Conservation Act was revealed to be totally false by the statistics. In 2023, 1,323 planning applications were approved across all three islands, which is the most ever recorded since the ESO began compiling these numbers in 2015.

Last week, Deputy Premier Kenneth Bryan again criticised the conservation legislation, implying that things had tipped too much in favour of the environment and applicants were struggling to get things done.

He is not alone. Local politicians have often erroneously suggested that the law is preventing the development and falsely claimed that it bestows unprecedented power on the director of the Department of the Environment.

But as has been shown repeatedly, the National Conservation Act is extremely limited in its ability to curb development even in the most egregious of circumstances. In the decade since the law was implemented, literally thousands of acres of critical mangroves, wetlands, primary unique habitat forest and shrubland, and the species they support have been lost to the bulldozer.

The reason that four members of the UPM government resigned last week had much to do with their disagreements with the remaining members over what they described as the goal of the UPM administration to gut the legislation to pave the way for “unfettered development“.

Although a lot of the information in the Compendium is now outdated and has been updated in other sources of statistical information from the ESO and other government entities, it is the only place where all of the country’s numbers in a 12-month period are pulled together in one document.

In this 2023 edition, tucked away towards the end of the compendium in Chapter 19, are the statistics from the Department of Environmental Health. This shows that 145,590 tonnes of rubbish was managed across all three islands in 2022, but even with a more than 10% increase in the population in 2023, the amount of rubbish managed by the DEH fell to 131,211.

Despite this unexplained and relatively unnoticeable drop in the amount of waste being managed, over the last ten years, the amount of garbage managed last year was still three and a half times more than the 38,697 tonnes of rubbish that went to the landfill in 2012.

The amount of power generated last year, however, was the most in CUC’s history, at 735,400 mw-hrs for the year, a notable increase on the 681,000 generated in 2022. Over the last decade, the compendium shows that in 2013, 40% of homes had a land-based telephone line, but just 14% did last year, while homes connected to the internet increased from around 64% in 2013 to almost 95% last year.

See the Compendium of Statistics on the ESO website here.