Climate progress is key to reinvigorate European project

(EurActiv, 21 May 2019) If the EU is to regain trust and achieve a renewed social contract, the most progressive response to the climate crisis must be at the core of its new mission, writes Martin Porter.

Martin Porter is executive chair in Brussels for the The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL).

No one could have read the UN’s recent global assessment of biodiversity, indicating that one million animal and plant species face extinction, and not be shocked. And last year’s ‘1.5 degrees’ IPCC report was just as stark in its warning that the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change will close by 2030, a mere decade away – making climate neutrality for Europe in advance of 2050 de facto necessary for the global goal to be met.

We clearly continue to have a fundamentally unsustainable global economy and society – and our political system in Europe is struggling to keep pace with and adapt to the need for fundamental change. For all its resilience, successes and continuing potential, if Europe’s current model of development is proving to be socially and politically unsustainable, the evidence that it is environmentally so is now overwhelming.

The urgency and scale of the changes necessary to address climate change alone – and biodiversity and ecosystem damage and resource depletion are now of equal significance – and so intertwined with broader policy areas as to be impossible to deal with separately and require immediate and enormous collective efforts if they are to be properly handled.

In this context, the importance of the European elections and the next five-year agenda they set for the new EU mandate are hard to underestimate. The significance of the likely new European Parliament is as much in its broader rejection of binary left-right thinking and allegiances represented by traditional political parties, as an appeal for new thinking from all parties on issues such as sustainability, where public trust is clearly at stake. But if it is to achieve a renewed social contract, the most progressive response to the climate crisis must surely be at its heart.

Public support for action on climate change by the EU is high and growing; it is an area where international co-operation and collaboration are considered obvious and essential to European citizens from all member states.

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EurActiv, 21 May 2019: Climate progress is key to reinvigorate European project