Green Week A reality check on consumption and sustainability

Publication date: 06 June 2008

Stavros Dimas
Member of the European Commission, responsible for Environment
Green Week: A reality check on consumption and sustainability

Good morning to all of you.

I have only just returned from Luxembourg where I have been negotiating a number of our climate change proposals with other Ministers. But I have been told by many colleagues that this year we have had a particularly stimulating Green Week and I would like to thank all participants for your contributions to the debates.

As I said at the opening on Tuesday, Green Week is an important ‘reality check’ on how the Commission and the other institutions are doing in our job of protecting Europe’s environment. Your participation this week – and there have been more than 2,000 of you here – has been a rich source of ideas and inspiration for how we can make our policies most effective.

It is clear from Timo Makela's report that the main message that came through in many of the sessions is that we need to we need to find a way to use limited resources in a much more sustainable way than at present and that we need to do this with a real urgency.

Our current patterns of consumption are simply not sustainable and are the driving force behind many of the environmental problems we face – from the still-increasing amounts of waste we generate, to the two greatest environmental challenges of our times, biodiversity loss and climate change.

There are three points raised during this Green Week that I would like to come back to in some more detail:

First, if we think that the current situation is difficult then a look to the future makes it seem that things are going to get considerably worse. With over 6 billion people on the planet our global environmental footprint already exceeds the Earth's biological capacity by about 25 per cent. We are depleting the planet's ecological stocks much faster than nature can regenerate them.

This in itself should be a cause for alarm and sufficient reason for urgent action. But then we have to bear in mind that the world's population is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. This inevitably means even greater demands on resources.

Added to this is the fact that the biggest impact on resources comes from the developed, consumerist countries – like Europe. In much of the rest of the world the impact is still relatively light. Footprints are comparatively small. But when you speak to Indian or Chinese consumers they have the – quite legitimate – aspiration to live just as well as people in Europe or in America.

China and India represent about one-third of the planet’s population. If in 20 years time these populations are consuming like Europeans are today. Then the additional burden placed on resources will be phenomenal.

A second point to emphasis is although "changing behaviour" sounds a very daunting task there is already a popular demand for action. The European public wants to go green and in the latest Eurobarometer opinion survey, 75% of respondents said they were ready to buy environment-friendly products even if they are more expensive.

The problem is that only 17% had actually done so in the month before the survey – so there is still a big gap between words and actions and we need to think hard about the reasons for this. The confusing array of labels on the market, and scepticism over the accuracy of some of the claims being made, are certainly contributing factors.

But there is also good news with these findings. 17% of a market of 500 million is a very significant market share. And the 50% of shoppers who want to buy green but are not doing it – yet - represent a very interesting market opportunity for European businesses to fill. It is hardly surprising that most of the world’s major retailers have been working to make their operations more environmentally friendly. This is why we are interested in working together with them to develop joint initiatives.

The third point I would like to take up is that the challenge of sustainable consumption and production is a global one and therefore – just as with other environmental issues - the European Union should be ready to take the lead.

History has shown that Europe carries a much greater weight on the international stage when we speak with one voice. The environmental product standards that we envisage under our forthcoming Action Plan will be set at the level of the single market and imports will also have to meet these standards.

This should be an important driver of promoting more environmental production in other parts of the world. And we can already see that Europe’s environmental standards are changing the way that the world does business. The Emission Trading System is being copied by other countries as are car emission standards and the way that we deal with hazardous wastes. On last week it seems that the American are looking to REACH as a possible model for dealing with their own regulation of chemicals.

The Action Plan will be our main initiative on sustainable consumption and production – and I outlined the main elements in the opening session. But it is certainly not all that we will be doing in this area and many of the other policies that we are developing also aim at a more sustainable use of resources.

The whole climate package is one example – lower emissions means a lower intensity consumption of energy.

We are also looking forward to Council and Parliament reaching agreement on the text of a revised waste directive. Waste is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of unsustainable consumption and it is one that strikes a deep chord with many people precisely because the problem is on their own doorstep and because it directly affects the quality of their life.

The revised directive will focus efforts across Europe to prevent the generation of waste by requiring member states to draw up national waste prevention plans and to benchmark the progress they make. And for the waste that cannot be prevented, the revised directive will also boost recycling efforts.

The destruction of nature is another clear example of unsustainable behaviour and we are working to stop biodiversity loss – both inside the EU and globally. I was very encouraged by the support received for the report that the Commission is supporting on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity. Pavan Sukhdev, the study leader presented his interim findings at the UN biodiversity conference in Bonn last week and also here at Green Week. In the case of climate change a better understanding of the economic case for ambitious action played a fundamental role in mobilising the opinion of policy makers. It is difficult to ignore the bottom line and we hope that Mr Sukhdev’s work will do the same for biodiversity.

We are also working to protect the world's forests. Deforestation is destroying species and ecosystems and causing around 20% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Much of this is due to illegal logging activities and the Commission will soon propose legislation to supplement the voluntary partnership agreements on illegal logging that we are currently negotiating with a number of countries. Our legislative proposal aims to prevent the trade in illegal timber and timber products. And after the summer we are planning to publish a policy paper setting out the Commission’s ideas on how we can best provide incentives for countries that have forests not to cut them down.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In my opening speech I said that it was time to move from words and to action.

There are many measures that we are developing that will take us a lot closer to a more sustainable way of living. And there will certainly be many more measures needed if we are going to have a chance of addressing challenges of the magnitude that we have been discussing over the last 3 days.

If we really are going to change the way we live then we will need inspiration and imagination. These are two priceless commodities – and thankfully this Green Week has shown that they are not in short supply. So I will finish by saying thank you for your encouragement, thank you for your criticism and thank you for coming.

Source: European commission - RAPID