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Press release
Sustainable Development not just for longer term! (Brussels, 9 February 2005) The Green 9 welcomes, the ambitions expressed in the European Commission's interim report on the implementation of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy today. The Commission is proposing to the European Council, meeting next month at the Spring Summit, to reinforce and operationalise the EU sustainable development strategy, agreed in 2001, and to maintain global EU leadership in this field. It proposes to, later this year, agree on clearer objectives and milestones, better monitoring and reporting of results, a clearer definition of the structural changes that are needed and better involvement of stakeholders. Also important to the EEB/environmental organisations is the commitment to have a more explicit global dimension in the Strategy, which means that EU's external EU policies need to be reviewed from this point. Last week, the European Commission published its plans for the continuation of the Lisbon agenda. It proposed to focus more strictly on economic growth and jobs. The EEB/environmental organisations insist that the Lisbon agenda which has been taken over by the economic pillar needs to function within the wider concepts of sustainable development, both social and environmental. John Hontelez, Secretary General EEB said: "Sustainable development is not something for the future, it needs to be integrated in all your policies right now. The Lisbon agenda can drive us away from sustainable development. We need more consistency from this Commission. This week it is proposing to mobilise market-based instruments for sustainable development. Great. But this should have been part of the proposals for the immediate future and firmly stated in the Lisbon Communication itself, aimed to shape the short term economic policies of the Member States". The environmental and health organisations therefore urgently call upon the Spring Summit to agree concrete commitments and timetables for the introduction of measures so often promised in general wordings, such as: price incentives, fiscal reform, green risk capital, halting biodiversity loss, green public procurement and the abolishment of environmentally harmful subsidies. For more information, please contact The Green 9 consists of nine leading environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active at EU level : BirdLife International, Climate Action Network Europe (CAN-Europe), European Environment Bureau (EEB), EPHA Environment Network (EEN), European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E), Friends of the Earth Europe (FoEE), Greenpeace, International Friends of Nature (IFN) and WWF European Policy Office (WWF-EPO)
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