Last July, the President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, He presented his renewed political orientations to face his new mandate. Today, a few days after knowing who your new commissioners will be, particularly in key portfolios such as Climate Action, we analyze their new projects for the Union.
If during its first term the Von der Leyen Commission proceeded with the creation of a European Green Dealin the period 2024-2029 must establish the ecological transition of the Union. Especially if he wants to honor the words he spoke in his investiture speech on July 18.
“[Los jóvenes] “They will never forgive us if we do not rise to the challenge,” he said, referring to the challenge posed by the climate emergency. “This is not just a question of competitiveness, but of intergenerational justice. Young people deserve it,” he said.
However, his new “political guidelines”, as his office has called the document in which he sets out his roadmap for the next five years, have not convinced everyone.
Jorgo Riss, director of Greenpeace in the EUregrets the “Lack of concreteness” in von der Leyen’s new political agenda. Although he celebrates the fact of “not throwing overboard” Green Dealstresses that it lacks “substantial new initiatives” and “the coherence that the proposals of his first term had”.
Similarly, Riss criticises the economic plan of the President of the European Commission for “ignoring the increasingly fragile ecological foundations on which employment and economic activity depend”. Because, he emphasises: “It will not improve the well-being of Europeans”.
Their agenda, believes the director of the environmental NGO, is “marked by the traces of the interests of big business.” He is also direct: “Only will cause greater neocolonial competition for resources, as well as increased pollution and exploitation of people and ecosystems.
For its part, WWF celebrates “President Von der Leyen’s commitment to strengthening compliance with and implementation” of the political guidelines related to the European Green Deal. Of course, the environmental NGO assures that, despite the fact that the Commission’s new program “lists some initiatives” that claimed “often lack ambition or content“.
WWF European Policy Bureau Director Ester Asin stressed in a statement that “it is clear that The majority of MEPs support a just and ecological transition“. And he regrets that this clear orientation for Europe has not been “further reinforced in the president’s programme”.
Asin breaks a lance for those who will be the new commissioners responsible for “strengthening and clarifying the often vague commitments set out by Von der Leyen”. But what are these “vague” measures that must be established in the coming weeks, with the start of the new parliamentary year?
European Prosperity Plan
Von der Leyen’s roadmap begins with a prosperity plan whose last name is the word “sustainable” and goes hand in hand with a Clean Industrial Pact to, according to the text itself, “decarbonize and reduce energy prices”. The President of the Community Executive stresses the need to launch the latter “for competitive industries and quality jobs” during the first hundred days of the mandate.
This will therefore be one of the first steps taken by this Von der Leyen Commission 2.0 as soon as it finally starts. “We will focus fully on supporting and creating the right conditions for businesses to achieve our common goals, by simplifying, investing and ensuring access to cheap, sustainable and secure energy supplies and raw materials.” Of course, his plan does not specify what these “right conditions” are.
What he mentions is that this will be the beginning of the path “towards the objective of reducing emissions by 90% by 2040”, which Von der Leyen intends to “write down” in a European climate law. In addition, he assures, they will present a Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator Act to “support industries and businesses throughout the transition.”
“This initiative will channel investments into infrastructure and industry, particularly in energy-intensive sectors. It will support pioneering European markets for development, production and diffusion in the clean technology industry and help speed up processes related to planning, tendering and permitting. We need to reduce energy bills for businesses and households,” says the policy text for this new legislature.
Circular and resilient economy
Once again, the European Commission, under the leadership of Germany, is seeking to lay the foundations for circular economy in the Union. And he will do it, he says, with a specific law which “will help create market demand for secondary materials and a single market for waste, particularly for key raw materials.”
The circularity of the economy is integrated into the Von der Leyen plan for European prosperity to be sustainable. However, their intentions do not materialize into concrete proposals to achieve this total transformation of European industry.
As WWF’s Asin warns, “Our economy and industries need a fundamental transformationBut an excessive focus on simplifying current legislation may open the door to climate deniers and anti-environmentalists, who could abandon essential environmental regulations that protect citizens.
NGOs are therefore focusing on how the bureaucratic and legislative simplification proposed by Von der Leyen will be combined with the radical change that must be made almost immediately to adapt the EU to the new climate reality.
Adaptation to climate change
Food security, water and nature. This would be the big blockage that raises eyebrows among many activists and NGOs, who believe that it is not enough to address the complex challenge that humanity is facing and that Europe intends to lead. In just over two pages, Von der Leyen’s roadmap resolves one of the headaches that will be discussed next November at the climate summit in Baku.
“Signs of environmental collapse are all around us: extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem deterioration. These are not abstract future scenarios; they are happening now,” recalls the director of WWF’s European Policy Bureau. Asin insists that action must be “rapid and significant” so that all efforts (and promises) do not remain a dead letter.
And, he explains, “otherwise it will only perpetuate the status quo, further increasing the costs of inaction on climate and nature“In her roadmap, Von der Leyen devotes only one page to climate adaptation. She hardly explains this enormous challenge.
The President of the EC puts on the table – or rather on paper – a European Climate Change Adaptation Plan, states that “in order to support Member States, particularly in terms of preparedness and planning, and to ensure that science-based risk assessments are carried out regularly”. However, there are few examples or indications of the most urgent decisions in this regard.
He also speaks of a European Water Resilience Strategy to “ensure that sources are managed appropriately, shortages are addressed and that we strengthen the competitive and innovative advantage of our water industry and adopt a circular economy approach.” As part of this plan, he explains, the EU intends to lead “efforts to mitigate and prevent acute water stress worldwide.”
However, as NGOs denounce, this specific part of the roadmap – essential for tackling the coming years of the planet – lacks concreteness and could be described as more abstract than anything else.
He also talks here about food sovereignty, agriculture, European Oceans Pact and the need to protect nature, but without detailing or clarifying how it will evolve.
