Idiomas:
In its 7th Environment Action Programme, the EU envisions that young children today will live around half their lives in a low-carbon society, based on a circular economy and resilient ecosystems. Achieving this commitment can put Europe at the frontier of science and technology but calls for a greater sense of urgency and more courageous actions. This report offers a knowledge-based contribution towards meeting those visions and goals and come to the conclusion that traditional incremental approaches based on the efficiency approach will not suffice. Rather, unsustainable systems of production and consumption require fundamental rethinking in the light of European and global realities.
The overall challenge for the next decades will be to recalibrate mobility, agriculture, energy, urban development, and other core systems of provision in such a way that global natural systems maintain their resilience, as the basis for a decent life.
The report underlines the urgent need for Europe to shift towards a much more integrated approach for addressing persistent, systemic environmental challenges. It identified the transition towards a green economy as one of the changes needed to secure the long-term sustainability of Europe and its neighborhood. The notion of the 'circular economy where nothing is wasted' (EU, 2013) is central to efforts to boost resource efficiency. Waste prevention, reuse and recycling enable society to extract maximum value from resources, and adapt consumption to actual needs. In doing so, they reduce demand for virgin resources, thereby mitigating related energy use and environmental impacts.
The limited evidence of progress in effecting this fundamental shift suggests that neither environmental policies alone nor both economic and technology-driven efficiency gains, are likely to be sufficient to achieve the 2050 vision.
Instead, living well within ecological limits will require fundamental transitions in the systems of production and consumption that are the root cause of environmental and climate pressures. Such transitions will, by their character, entail profound changes in dominant institutions, practices, technologies, policies, lifestyles and thinking. Recalibrating existing policy approaches can make an essential contribution to such transitions.
In the environment and climate policy domain, four established and complementary approaches could enhance progress to long-term transitions if considered together and implemented coherently. These are:
Europe's success in moving towards a green economy will depend in part on striking the right balance between these four approaches. Policy packages that include objectives and targets explicitly recognising the relationships between resource efficiency, ecosystem resilience and human well-being would accelerate the reconfiguration of Europe's systems of production and consumption. Governance approaches that engage citizens, non-governmental organisations, businesses and cities would offer additional levers in this context. When it comes to policy gaps, the most important problems are the timeframes that current policy frameworks address (too few long-term binding targets); and their degree of integration. Both the EU and European countries have continued to set new objectives and targets for the period 2025 to 2050 but this only occurs in a small number of policy areas and few of these new objectives and targets are legally binding.
The financial crisis has not reduced the focus of European citizens on environmental issues. Indeed, European citizens strongly believe that more needs to be done at all levels to protect the environment, and that national progress should be measured using environmental, social and economic criteria.
