These were the words of Hans Bruyninckx, EEA Executive Director, when presented Europe’s state of the environment 2020 (link). He put strong emphasis on the conclusion that “Europe has a narrow window of opportunity in the next decade to scale up measures to protect nature, lessen the impacts of climate change and radically reduce our consumption of natural resources”.
As illustrated by the table below, the measures adopted those last 15 years by the EU have demonstrated that circular economy has moved beyond the state of proof. However, in many cases (biodiversity, chemical pollution, water, etc), these measures will not fit the job to reach EU objectives for 2030 and 2050 especially. A deeper transformation is necessary.
In view of this alarming situation, the EU Green Deal (link) was presented in December 2019 as a “new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use”. With the adoption of the EU recovery plan in July 2020, the EU green deal became part of a coherent framework to prepare Europe for the next generation. Here is a mind map aimed at to capturing the key components of the Green Deal initiative.
The level of commitment showed by the EU authorities cannot be questioned but they can only create an enabling framework. Other actors (national governments, business, civil society, research, ) must step in and take part to collective learning processes to implement the transition successfully. Some early insights can already be highlighted :
- Already demonstrated solutions have in common that they have focused on optimizing the total system performance rather than that of a single component (link). This calls for a systemic approach to understand the interactions and to spot leverage points.
- The transition towards a Circular Economy has a clear territorial dimension (link). The analysis should cover changes in resource use, design, production, distribution, consumption, and waste management. In this context working at local level (i.e. cities) is a very interesting option since it makes it easier to balance concerns and to implement organizational change.
- Organizations have lived in a stable environment for many decades. The competitive advantage resulted from executing better than competitors (link). This is no longer the case. The issue at stake is not to develop technologies for new product but to understand emerging demands and the drivers beyond.
Sustainable Synergies 