067 | THE EU SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
Position paper towards
the EU Sustainable Development Strategy
Issued jointly with
the European Environmental Bureau (EEB)
International Friends of Nature (IFN)
Shaping the New Europe
Working towards sustainable development
Contribution to the work of the European Commission on a Sustainable
Development Strategy, to be adopted by the European Council in June 2001.
The text is based on work done by the European Environmental Bureau.
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Summary (see below)
Introduction
A
new social and economic agenda
Summary
The Sustainable Development Strategy should become a tool for generating a new momentum for Europe, one that also restores citizens' confidence that the EU leaders can be trusted to create the conditions for long-term prosperity, social fairness and a clean and healthy environment. This is also of crucial importance for the new Member States, which should be able to innovate in order to shift their economies towards sustainable development, avoiding unsustainable developments and maintaining their lead in other areas.
The Strategy should also be a key instrument in the EU contribution to Rio +10 and a progressive global leadership. European leadership will be most firmly established if it can convincingly show that it is able and prepared to handle matters at home while creating opportunities for developing countries.
The elaboration of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy should be detailed and concrete. A specific set of crucial issues therefore needs to be defined and tackled in every policy field. The strategy must include the commitments - and signatures - of those responsible in each policy area, undertaking to develop their own strategies in more detail and propose as far as possible policy solutions that simultaneously deliver progress on each crucial issue.
The political mandate of the Commission is limited to 2005, but the scope of the strategy covers one generation, i.e. 20 to 30 years.
A New social and economic agenda
This ongoing trend offers a unique opportunity to drastically reduce the material character and impact of the European economy and increase the use of human resources. It could create the basis for new ways of production, new ways of transportation and energy use, and the development of new technologies that provide employment as well as social and environmental benefits.
Over the next decade, the main challenge for the EU will be to produce more welfare using less natural resources and more human resources. Decoupling economic growth from resource use and pollution is absolutely essential for global sustainable development, and Europe can and should take the lead in this area. This development is urgently needed because we have not seen the necessary reversal of trends in the state of the environment. In practice, most of the progress achieved at the level of environment policies has been cancelled out by economic growth.
The Sustainable Development Strategy should include a concrete action programme to be led by a special Commission task force, which aims at achieving increases in resource productivity and lower environmental impact in all economic sectors, over the whole lifecycle of products and services. The first target sectors should be food and agriculture, industry, energy, and transport.
The EU sectoral policies should all be scrutinised for barriers and opportunities to shift economic activities towards sustainable development. This should result in ambitious workplans in the short and long term.
Business leader Percy Barnevik (ABB): "Environment will represent one of the biggest possibilities for technical and leadership-based innovation - and profitable companies - which the world has ever witnessed".
A better quality of life
On approximately 15 crucial themes, long-term sustainability objectives need to be determined, with the aim of reaching them within one generation (30 years at the most). This should be done by taking the opinions and evidence of relevant stakeholders into account. Here, the EEB, FOEE and IFN suggest 10 targets for resource use and environmental quality. As for socio-economic sustainability targets, they recommend to carefully incorporate other major socio-economic challenges, consulting European citizens' organisations and other stakeholders. To specify objectives and policies for global sustainability, stakeholders from developing countries also need to be consulted.
In the field of environment and health, a full implementation of the precautionary principle should be striven for. This relates to the use of potentially harmful substances as well as to GMOs.
New forms of European Governance
To make Europe more democratic, more accessible, accountable
and transparent for its citizens and encourage public participation
in all important political processes, we need several institutional reforms.
European institutions need to respond to citizens' concerns, allow and
encourage citizens' involvement and offer them the opportunity to monitor
their actions and if necessary enforce the law.
Throughout all the EU institutions, the institutional preliminary conditions
for sustainable development need to be optimised. As the social, economic
and natural systems are very complex, with many cross-connections, these
connections should be reflected in institutional and governmental structures.
The subsidiarity principle needs to be applied in such a way as to enhance
sustainable development. This paper focuses on the EU level, where the
right preliminary conditions should be created:
- Continued responsibility for progress and implementation of
the Sustainable Development Strategy at the highest level, with a special
task force led by the Commission President.
- Compulsory, strategic impact assessment with respect to the
main sustainability targets.
- Guaranteeing independent progress monitoring and reporting to the President and Parliament.
In the Global Assessment of the Fifth Environmental Action Programme (EAP), the European Environment Agency has provided a useful analysis and set of criteria for monitoring progress towards the integration of environmental concerns.
Global responsibility
The EU has an important role to play in creating a more effective and
equal global economy. The EU Sustainable Development Strategy should include
the following objectives, with a commitment to elaborate short-term detailed
action programmes for each of these aspects:
- reducing the negative impacts of its own production and consumption
patterns;
- promoting the development of civil society, sustainable production
and consumption and fair trade in developing countries;
- taking the lead in the reform of international institutions,
rules and systems;
- increasing rather than reducing the transfer of money to developing countries, but applying Sustainability Impact Assessments to these funds.
These principles should be applied even more vigorously to relations
with accession countries: active involvement of civil society, Sustainability
Impact Assessment of EU plans and funds and ample financial support to
the development of a sustainable society.
In one way or another, many of the actions and policies proposed in this
paper are required or recommended in Agenda 21 and the conclusions of
the Earth Summit +5, to which the EU has committed itself.