EUROPEAN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

+ A Sustainable Europe for a Better World: A European Union Strategy for Sustainable Development - Communication from the European Commission 2001 -- [ http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/eussd/index.htm ]

The European Commission prepared a proposal for a long-term EU strategy on sustainable development for the Gothenburg European Council in June 2001. It contains a number of proposals for how the European Union can improve its policy making to make it more coherent and focussed on the long term, as well as a number of specific headline objectives and the measures needed to achieve them.

The Commission's proposal for a sustainable development strategy builds on the analysis in a consultation paper released at the end of March 2001, and on the responses to that paper. The consultation paper identified a number of unsustainable trends that need to be urgently tackled, and provided an analysis of the key drivers behind these trends.

In Gothenburg, the European Council agreed on its strategy for sustainable development with four priority areas: climate change, transport, public health and natural resources. These issues are to complement the social and economic aspects of sustainable development, which are being dealt with in the so-called "Lisbon process" of Spring Summits.

The Gothenburg European Council asked the Commission to evaluate the implementation of the Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) in its annual synthesis report, on the basis of a number of headline indicators, to be agreed by the Council in time for use for the European Summit in Barcelona in March 2002.

NGOs, however, consider he concrete results of the Gothenburg Summit, rather disappointing. As they argue, the Sustainable Development Strategy does not offer more than nice wording as governments watered down most concrete targets proposed by the Commission.

The Commission stresses the need for an effective EU contribution to the WSSD. Its forthcoming EU Sustainable Development Strategy and the recently proposed 6th Environment Action Programme are planned to be important European contributions. The Commission has also published a paper outlining its key priorities in the preparation process towards the WSSD.

In the context of the preparations for Johannesburg, the European Commission, DG ENV, will also elaborate a Euromed Sustainable Development Strategy, SDS. The Euromed SDS will be adopted by the Euromed Ministers of Environment in Athens, July 2002 It will be submitted to the WSSD as part of the EU contribution. It is planned that the SDS is elaborated applying a participatory and open approach. To that end, the draft will be circulated and discussed with the SMAP National Correspondents of 27 Partner countries and the NGOs in Malta (February 2002) and Brussels (April 2002).