THE EU’s SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

The undersigned organisations representing the eight largest environmental NGOs in Europe, the ‘Green G8’, have agreed the following statement ahead of the Göteborg European Council on the subject of the EU’s Sustainable Development Strategy.

We have restricted our comments here to general points of principle about the strategy document and process. Detailed comments on its contents will be dealt with in separate consultations.

1. We welcome the document as an important contribution to the general debate about future directions for sustainable development in Europe. We believe Heads of State and Government have an historic opportunity at the Göteborg European Council to launch a sustainable development strategy for Europe comparable in scope and importance to the Single Market and Economic and Monetary Union initiatives of the last decade.

2. We believe that certain directions included in the strategy document must become the foundation of the next steps in the strategy’s evolution. We emphasise, in particular, the intention to progressively de-couple resource use from economic growth, getting prices right by costing pollution, removing perverse subsidies, particularly in energy, fisheries, transport and agriculture, and greater emphasis on ensuring widespread public consultation in policy development. Precise targets in areas of dematerialisation drawing on Factor 4 and Factor 10 analyses should be included in subsequent versions of the strategy.

3. We are pleased that sustainable development will be included in the cycle of the Spring Council meetings. We therefore fully expect that the Council of Environment Ministers will be given equivalent status as ECOFIN and Social Councils in the preparation of the indicators and environment policy guidelines reports similar to those foreseen for the economic and social reports.

4. We envisage an expanded role and resources for the European Environmental Agency in Copenhagen in contributing to this Spring-cycle process.

5. We note the links made with the so-called ‘Cardiff’ process for integrating sustainable development into the work of the different sectoral councils and welcome the fact that this process will continue in its own right as a contribution to the Spring summits. There is no mechanism currently foreseen in the strategy for incorporating the external dimension of the Cardiff sectoral strategies in a continuous policy process. This needs to be corrected lest it reinforces the unfortunate and regrettable internal EU orientation of the whole process.

6. We very much regret that the global dimension of the EU’s sustainable development strategy is so weak. The preparation of a separate Communication to be ready in early 2002 as a contribution to the World Sustainable Development Summit in Johannesburg later that year is only a small consolation. The Göteborg conclusions must clarify which Commission services and Councils will be involved in the preparation of this companion strategy for the missing global dimension. Further, clarification is needed on the process to be followed for public consultation and eventual approval of the external strategy and its relationship to the domestic EU strategy before and after the Johannesburg Summit, including the monitoring of the external dimension in the Spring summit cycle.

7. We welcome the preparation of an action plan for the Laeken Summit in December to improve assessment procedures of regulatory action at the EU level, both for their internal and external impacts. However, we are strongly of the view that the action plan cannot be restricted to ‘major legislative proposals’ alone; the assessment must also include the impact of major policy proposals in the same way that strategic environmental assessment will soon operate at European and Member State levels.

8. We strongly reject the move in the strategy towards more support to the research, development and dissemination of technology on ‘safer nuclear energy, namely the management of nuclear waste.’ There was no reference to this point in the consultation document issued by the Commission at the end of March. We believe it should ‘slip out’ of the strategy as quickly as it was clearly ‘slipped in’.

9. We regret the fact that time pressures for the preparation of the strategy document precluded consultation on the contents of the document. We expect European Heads of State and Government to correct this by setting out a firm timetable for consultations on both the internal and external EU strategy documents between now and the Danish Presidency in the second part of 2002.

10. One of the objectives of the consultation process should be to clarify what constitutes firm policy commitments as opposed to more general policy aspirations. This confusion creates doubts in the reader’s mind about whether the document can be properly called a ‘strategy’ or whether, in fact, it is more accurately described as an important step towards one.

Our organisations have jointly agreed this statement as a contribution to your discussions in Göteborg. We emphasise our willingness to participate actively in further consultations between now and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002, not only on the internal EU strategy document that has been presented by the Commission to date, but also on the external relations strategy whose publication we urgently await.

As sent from:

BirdLife International

EC Office

22 Rue de Toulouse

B – 1040 Brussels

Climate Network Europe

44 Rue du Taciturne

B – 1000 Brussels

European Environmental Bureau

35 Boulevard de Waterloo

B – 1000 Brussels

Friends of the Earth Europe

29 Rue Blanche

B – 1060 Brussels

Greenpeace EC Unit

37-39 Rue de la Tourelle

B – 1040 Brussels

European Federation for Transport & Environment

34 Boulevard de Waterloo

B – 1000 Brussels

Friends of Nature International

Diefenbachgasse 36

A – 1150 Vienna

WWF European Policy Office

Avenue de Tervuren 36, Bte 12

B – 1040 Brussels