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Generally speaking, the objective of environmental policy is to maintain and improve the quality of the environment and citizens’ health while respecting the demands of sustainable development. It reacts to the necessity of integrating the activities that have been focused in one specialised area only, and reflects all significant environmental changes.

In 2004 the Government of the Czech Republic approved the State Environmental Policy of the Czech Republic 2004 – 2010 (SEP) which defines the basic framework of a long and middle-term environmental sustainable development of the Czech Republic. It is a document covering all other conceptual environmental materials (e.g. policies concerning particular environmental components).

The main purpose of the SEP is to provide a guideline for decision-making and activities at the international, national, regional and local levels aimed at:

• improved quality of the environment as a whole and of its components,
• implementation of sustainable development principles in compliance with the European and Czech Sustainable Development Strategy and continuing the integration of environmental aspects into the policies of the ministries,
• increased economic efficiency and social acceptability of environmental programmes, projects and activities.

Pursuant to the 6th Environment Action Plan of the EU, the SEP priorities focus mainly at solving continuous and newly emerged environmental issues in the areas of:

• protection of nature, landscape and biological diversity,
• sustainable use of natural resources, water protection and anti-flood measures, material flow optimisation and waste management,
• decrease of environmental load originating from human activities, improvement of environmental standards for a better quality of human life,
• protection of the climatic system of the Earth and elimination of long-term pollution transfer.

The SEP provides a whole range of tools to accomplish the above-named objectives. Normative, economic, institutional, organisation, information, voluntary and other instruments are meant to be combined in such a way as to achieve the objectives with the least finances, personnel, technical and other resources. A number of indicators was proposed to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the SEP’s fulfilment; these indicators correspond to the indicators monitored within the EU and the OECD.