Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

The letter of 21st July 1999 sent by Mr David Lewis to the Royal Academy of Engineering has been circulated to a number of Fellows of the Royal Academy including myself and I am happy to respond with some personal views.

The "background to the new study" is persuasive and it recognises that "there may be good reasons for not attempting to cover all aspects of the environment in a single comprehensive procedure".

However, the Environmental Agencies do have expertise and concern for all environmental issues and one can imagine situations where to ignore noise pollution aspects could lead to bad planning and bad land use.

I was in fact surprised to note that the Institute of Acoustics was not one of the 80 or so organisations to whom the letter was sent. The Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals might also have identified for the Royal Commission a greater number of universities with relevant expertise who might be usefully contacted now or in the next phase of the study.

Further there was no explicit reference to "Greenfield" or "brownfield" developments and from my own experience the relationship of agricultural and maricultural operations involving livestock and pollution could well be significant in planning terms.

The "broad topics to be covered" are most impressive in their scope - and one possible additional topic might be

      j) how other countries have tackled all these issues.

I consider that Hong Kong and Singapore have been active and might yield useful data.

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