Impact assessment and sustainable energy policy are the key priorities for a revived EU sustainable development strategy, according to a stakeholder conference held in Brussels.
The conference did not follow the usual format of most Brussel’s stakeholder meetings, but used an ‘open space’ format, leading to more involvement and creativity from the participants of the conference. In more than 35 working groups, proposed by the participants themselves, priorities and actions were defined for the EU’s review of the Sustainable Development Strategy.
Main messages and priorities defined by the conference:
The Lisbon agenda and the Sustainable Development Strategy mutually reinforce each other. The SDS is the more long-term, overarching principle of all EU policies:
- Integrated impact assessments (IAs) should be used as a tool for sustainable development. These assessments should measure the economic, social and environmental impact of EU proposals at the earliest stages of policy preparation;
- The EU needs a more ambitious long term strategy for sustainable energy;
- There is a lack of social objectives in the SDS: themes like poverty, social exclusion and ageing society are too absent in the debate;
- The EU has to do more for the sustainable use of natural resources (IPP, decoupling, ecolabeling, shifting taxation from labour to non-renewable resources);
- More debate is needed on the relationship between WTO trade liberalisation and sustainable development;
- The local and regional levels need more support from the EU’s SD strategy: stiff sustainability requirements are needed for actions taken as part of Structural Funds programmes;
Some other specific recommendations that were proposed in the working groups:
- There is a need for an EU white paper on a new European social and cultural model;
- The EU should set up an action programme for the communication and education of sustainable development, with a budget of between 20 and 30 million euros.
- Institutional: more horizontality is needed in the functioning of the Commission’s services to break with the sectoral departmentalisation of the DGs; a sustainability monitoring body (ECOSOC?) could be set up to evaluate the EU’s policies against the objectives of the sustainable development strategy.