Resource Efficiency flagship launches tomorrow

The European Commission’s President José Manuel Barroso will launch the Flagship Initiative on resource efficiency tomorrow. As mentioned in my previous post, this should start to spell out what the Commission intends to do to address the challenges posed by our increasing use of the world’s resources.

President Barroso’s web page is here, and the press release should appear on the “Midday Express” page at around 12.00 CET on Tuesday 26th.

Many groups will release press statements during the afternoon following the release, including Friends of the Earth Europe and the European Environment Bureau. I expect that it will also be covered by the news sites Euractiv and, in the early evening, ENDS Europe Daily.

Update: There should also be a live video feed here on the Commission’s web site; after the event you should be able to watch a recorded stream from the same page

The EU2020 Resource Efficiency Flagship Initiative – what is it?

At the start of March, the Commission published its new EU 2020 strategy, “A strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”, which included a commitment to “Sustainable growth – promoting a more resource efficient, greener and more competitive economy.“

In order achieve this transition, the Commission proposed a “Flagship Initiative” on a ”Resource Efficient Europe“:

The aim is to support the shift towards a resource efficient and low-carbon economy that is efficient in the way it uses all resources. The aim is to decouple our economic growth from resource and energy use, reduce CO2 emissions, enhance competitiveness and promote greater energy security.

In the months since this announcement, the big question has been: What does this actually mean in practice?

During this period, the Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik has been making clear his views on the importance of Resource Efficiency, for example in this speech to an event at Oxford University:

“..what the world doesn’t need is a blinkered pattern of consumption; production and usage that strips our planet without working out something fundamental from the word go: we don’t have enough to go round!

Resource efficiency for me is the philosophy against the next great extinction. We are trying to throw away, the throwaway generation.”

At Friends of the Earth Europe we decided that this was a good time to organise an event to discuss this initiative, and how to make sure it makes a real difference.

The event (which was in a small room & totally full, so I didn’t promote it here) happened last Thursday in the European Parliament; the presentations are now on-line, and in a few weeks we will upload a full write-up.

The presentations cover a range of issues, including how the supermarket REWE in Austria is using the SERI/FOEE resource use indicators, how business resource efficiency is being improved in North Rhine Westphalia in Germany, why Europe needs a binding energy efficiency target, and (from me) how measuring Europe’s resource use can help improve our resource efficiency, in particular the future pressures on land.

What the presentations don’t include (but will be in the write-up) is the introductory presentation by Robin Miege of DG Environment, and the panel discussion with contributions from DG Agriculture, DG Enterprise and DG Employment.

A number of points struck me in these presentations and discussions:

• The Commission (probably President Barroso himself) will launch a ‘Communication’ on the Resource Efficiency Flagship Programme in January.
• There is lots of work going on within Commission DGs as part of this communication & the various processes that will follow it. This includes studies, and more cross-Commission work than is normal.
• Although the Commission are doing a lot of internal communication on this subject, there is not much external visibility of these discussions.
• DG Environment are going to publish a ‘Road Map’ on Resource Efficiency in June or July, probably preceded by a consultation in January/February.
• Other DGs have linked processes going on, which should reflect or be part of this Flagship, including reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, a new Energy Efficiency Action plan and a Transport White Paper.
• There are also links with other EU2020 Flagship Initiatives, including on Innovation, Industrial Policy and Jobs & Skills.

The big question is: Will this Flagship Programme (and EU2020 as a whole) result in real policies that lead to a substantial reduction in Europe’s levels of resource use?

Of course, we also need to make sure that we are actually measuring our resource use, otherwise we won’t actually know if new policies are really reducing our resource use!!!

 

A quick catch-up

I’m sorry about the months of silence on this blog – things have just been too busy, and I didn’t seem to be able to make the time to post.

However, I’m hoping to change that now & post more regularly!

Here’s a few relevant things that we’ve been up to in the past few months:

• Our conference on “Measuring Europe’s Resource Use: A vital tool in creating a resource efficient EU“, mentioned in a previous post, happened at the beginning of June, and was very interesting and successful. We’ve produced a full write up, and all the presentations are available, see this page on the Friends of the Earth Europe site.
• We commissioned a study of how many jobs could be created in the EU if the current recycling target of 50% would be increased to 70% – the answer being over 500,000! For more details, see the press release and the full study.
• We organised another event on resource efficiency in the European Parliament last week – the talks are now on the web, but I’ll do another post about the event soon.

Measuring Europe’s resource use – a briefing and conference

We live in a finite world, and global use of natural resources – land, water, materials – continues to increase, as does our emissions of global warming gases. Yet the EU doesn’t consider resource use in its policymaking – it doesn’t even have a system to measure it!

The main focus of my work at Friends of the Earth at the moment is to change this. We’ve been working with Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna to work out how we can effectively measure resource use, and how this can then be used to derive better EU policies.

We have selected four indicators – land footprint, water footprint, material use and carbon footprint – all of which evaluate the global use of resources created by Europe consumption. We’ve recently published a new briefing - available here – that explains these indicators & how they could be used.

We’re also organising a conference on the subject in the European Parliament on the morning of the 1st June – the agenda is here, and there’s a registration form here (ideally you should register by the 21st May):

Resource efficiency is rising up the European agenda, with the new Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik adopting it as one of his priorities, and a resource efficiency ‘roadmap’ in the EU2020 strategy.

But what is resource efficiency – what’s the global impact of Europe’s resource use – and why isn’t the EU currently even measuring how much of the world’s resources we use?

Friends of the Earth Europe has been working with Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna to try to come to a workable yet effective solution to the problem of how to measure Europe’s use of the world’s resources. We have proposed four resource use indicators: material use, water use, land use and GHG emissions.

This event will offer the opportunity to discuss the implication of these indicators on EU policymaking, and the benefits of monitoring and reducing our resource use.

The event is hosted by Chris Davies MEP and Sirpa Pietikäinen MEP, and speakers include Stefan Giljum from Sustainable Europe Research Institute, Steve Evans from Cranfield University and Tim Rice from Actionaid and Michael Warhurst from Friends of the Earth, followed by an MEP panel discussion and opportunity to ask questions.

It’s worth noting that the conference is followed the same afternoon by the launch of the European Commission’s Green Week, a free event which includes high level speakers on resource use and biodiversity (advance registration required on the green week web site).

Changing our culture to achieve sustainability…..

The Worldwatch institute have just released a fascinating – and lengthy – publication on ‘Transforming Cultures’ as part of their ‘State of the World’ series.

It covers a wide range of issues, from the environmental & wellbeing advantages of working fewer hours per week, to the role of education, business, religions and Government in the transformation to a sustainable society.

A free preview version – with a number of full chapters, including the one on working time, is available from here; the full 268 page report costs $9.95 for the pdf.

Commission nominees give written responses to Parliament’s questions

Next week in Brussels the European Parliament’s committees will be cross-examining the nominees for the new Commission – the timetable is here. The Parliament has sent written questions to the nominees already, and has now published their responses on their Hearings web site.

The Environment nominee Janez Potočnik says in his response that his “three priorities .. would be promoting a green economy, halting the loss of biodiversity and implementing and improving existing environmental legislation.”

He also puts a welcome emphasis on the importance of making Europe more resource efficient, which is a priority for my work at Friends of the Earth (see our Resources & Consumption campaign web page for more info):

Resource efficiency will be a critical component of any strategy to protect our environment and enhance our competitiveness. It will mean putting in place the right mix of smart regulation, incentives and market-based mechanisms to foster eco-innovation and sustainable consumption and production, finding ways to promote the changes needed which fully respect our levels of environmental ambition. This will include presenting action plans for eco- innovation, environmental technologies and the next phase of Sustainable Consumption and Production to make the EU more resource efficient.

He also acknowledges that environmental policy is not about selecting one “silver bullet” – ‘If we are to achieve ambitious environmental objectives, we must act on many policy fronts.’

Interesting post on different approaches to foreign affairs between Commission and governments

The ‘Charlemagne’ blog from the Economist has an interesting post discussing what he learnt from his contacts as he wrote an article about the new EU representative for foreign affairs, who heads up the new External Action Service (EAS), and the issue of who should be in the driving seat, the Commission or EU governments:

‘One is the very deep cultural difference between the European Commission and the national governments, when it comes to foreign policy, or “external relations” in the Brussels jargon.

National diplomats tend to see the world, ultimately, in rather Hobbesian terms. Strip away the talk of co-operation and values, and at the end of the day they are paid to promote their countries’ national interests in a rough and at times wicked world.

The European Commission has a different culture. The commission has instruments that help it exercise soft power: it gives out money for projects and programmes, or makes proposals to ease visa rules for citizens of country X or Y. It signs trade deals, and reports on whether countries that want to join the EU are fit to do so.

These are all important things, but Kissinger it ain’t. In other words, the commission can only function in a rational world, and as long as a legitimate partner is sitting on the other side of the table, pen in hand, ready to sign an action plan, or agree to some new programme or partnership accord.

National diplomats, for all their smooth manners, have to be prepared to go a bit more off-road, if you know what I mean’

He also makes a second – quite controversial – suggestion:

‘A second big point kept coming up. I would put it to interviewees that I had heard anger from some national governments about, say, the way the European Parliament was flexing its muscles and trying to assert control over the new EAS.

Well what did they expect, the Lisbon Treaty gives them powers over the budget of the EAS, my interviewees would say. More than once, I heard the same despairing phrase, said of EU foreign ministers and heads of government: “the problem is, they signed the treaty without reading it”, or “they should have read the treaty, and worked out the consequences.”

I do not want to fuel the most outlandish Eurosceptic fantasies here: I am sure that such phrases have their share of hyperbole. Most European governments will have tried to work out if the Lisbon Treaty contained things that should worry them.

But there is something to the jibes though. I have no doubt that British ministers, for example, were probably briefed during the drafting of the EU constitution (the first version of the Lisbon Treaty), that it could cause problems to give more powers to the European Parliament. But they were so busy seeking opt-outs from things like immigration policy that they did not have time to focus on things like the powers of the parliament.

And the shorthand for that process is the phrase that several senior people used this week, when talking to me: “they should have read the treaty before they signed it.’