The next few days and weeks will be ripe full of Cabinet appointments and fresh mandates on the part of the government, and of elections and a subsequent changing of the guard within the ranks of the opposition.

But once the dust settles and business as usual begins again, the government will be facing two environmental hurdles that may be difficult to overcome.

Environmental concerns, in particular the state’s sale of Outside Development Zone land for private development, were the source of the public discontent the government found itself the subject of from early on in the last legislature - specifically when the whole Zonqor Point-AUM ODZ controversy erupted.

Environmental concern was in fact at the top of the national agenda at the beginning of the last legislature before it was relegated by the Panama Papers revelations.

The unveiling of the corruption allegations against the highest levels of government came later, but before that first and foremost on the public mind was the concern for the environment. 

But that concern was, quite understandably, superseded and far overshadowed by the maelstrom of corruption allegations that was to hit the government.

After that the environment took something of a backseat as the nation was driven toward a snap election, with other far more pressing matters of basic good governance took the wheel.

But now that the electoral cycle has come full circle, there will be a great many things for the reappointed administration to consider, and there will be a great many bridges to be built.

One of those first considerations should be in favour of the environment, which was among the first signs of discontent in the last administration and as such the next administration would do well to pay it some pre-emptive heed.

This holds especially after environmental concerns were given so little real attention in this past electoral campaign, perhaps the least they were given in campaigns in recent memory.

That was of course to have been expected given the nature of the electoral campaign and the gravity of some of the situations at hand.  But the parties’ environmental initiatives, those that there were, naturally played second fiddle to the more bread and butter issues, not to mention the furore created by the corruption accusations.

That was, after all, to be expected.  But there was actually one suggestion over the course of the campaign that concerns the environment a great deal, that was the Prime Minister’s suggestion of redrawing the Outside Development Zones.

This, he says, would be done in such a way that the nation’s overall ODZ area would remain the same, and that the extension of development zones in some areas would be compensated for by extending ODZ areas in other places.

The suggestion could make sense, with the Prime Minister having described the way in which the current zones had been drawn up as ‘crazy’, but it is also a cause for concern given the pressure the government has had from aggrieved landowners who feel their land had been unjustly excluded from development zones and that their land’s value had been unfairly depreciated.

It is also of grave concern given the interest in such areas by developers who are already drooling at the prospect of certain tracts of land become  developable.

The stakes are great and the profits to be made are even greater.  This is clearly a path potentially fraught with corruption and one that will have to be tread with the utmost of transparency.

Much of the same can be said of the eventual designs for Paceville, in the form of a master plan, when it sees the light of day in the near future.

Both initiatives are potential environmental minefields through which the government will be treading very carefully because it knows hat even though it has been silent of late, the environment is the issue that will always come back to haunt it.