Why the EU’s member states need to take a leap forward

Two MEPs debate how to achieve the goal of sustainable development

The EU needs to pay much more attention to the environment if it wants to achieve sustainability, says Hiltrud Breyer

In her recent hit Hung Up, the popstar Madonna sings that 'time goes by so slowly'. But for world leaders and for the environment time is actually running out. Urgent action is needed. Environmental concerns have to be included in policies. Not only because more than 70% of EU citizens want decision-makers to give equal weight to environmental, economic and social policies. And not only because this majority believes, as Eurobarometer polls show, that environment protection policies are an incentive for innovation and not an obstacle to economic performance. But because it is a necessity.

Current environmental challenges are more complex and diffuse than in the past. The most pressing task is the climate change under way. Arguably the biggest challenge humanity faces in the 21st century, climate change is already happening faster than previously expected. Average European temperatures have risen in the past century by 0.95�C and are expected to rise by 2-6�C in this century. The impact is already evident in regional water shortages or melting polar ice. Sea levels rising by seven metres if Greenland's glaciers melt or even by 100m if the Antarctic's glaciers melt might no longer be fictional horror scenarios.

There are other scenes of major impact. EU greenhouse gas emissions range from five to 25 tonnes of carbon per person, equivalent to up to EUR 1,500 per person in social costs each year. Because of air pollution-related illness Europe loses 200 million working days a year. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) further estimates that 6.4% of deaths and illnesses in European children are caused by outdoor pollution. A shocking number of species are threatened, including 42% of native mammals, 15% of birds, 45% of butterflies, 30% of amphibians, 45% of reptiles and 52% of freshwater fish.

To deny these facts is to close one's eyes to reality. Effective policy measures need 5-10 years to be put in place. But the harmful impacts and the time to reverse them may take up to 100 years or more. Inaction can result in very large health, social and economic costs as experiences with asbestos, acid rain, the ozone hole or polychlorinated biphenyls illustrate.

This is one of the most important lessons to learn. Leaders can no longer ignore their "silent environment child, as its fatal disease will undermine the health of the whole family" - to use the words of the European Environmental Bureau. Environmental protection and economic growth can go hand-in-hand. The European Environment Agency's report 2005 also comes to this conclusion. Long-term coherent policies can encourage the re-structuring of incentives from financial instruments. Market prices and taxes might be the instruments to reduce the rising costs, increasingly evident, of using the planet's natural resources.

The European public is ready to take action. This is the opportunity for political leaders to set examples. By supporting environmental protection strategies and by including them horizontally in their policies, they can underline the importance of the environment for Europe's future welfare and initiate necessary behavioural changes.

The alarmingly one-sided Lisbon Agenda cannot be the figurehead for the EU. Instead of a standstill and rollback in environmental policies we need a leap forward. The evidence is clear. On present trends, economic losses from environmental stress could exceed the total value of human production in just two generations. But a healthy environment and healthy citizens are of invaluable importance to the economy.

Europe can and should take the lead for a clean, clever and competitive future. It can also be the stimulus for discussions at United Nations level. Together with UN conventions, the support of non-parliamentary initiatives such as the soon to be launched World Future Council and of course non-governmental organisations, the EU could finally bring economic development in line with the Earth's capacities and act in accordance with the words of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Environmental protection is not everything, but without environmental protection everything is nothing."

• German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer is a member of the Parliament's committee on the environment, public health and food safety.

Governments need to recognise sustainable development as a process, not an outcome, says Syed Kamall

World leaders have promised action on climate change ever since the warnings of the 1980s about global warming and those of the 1970s about a new ice age. The challenge has always been characterised as having to balance economic development against the need to avoid damage to the environment. This approach reached its zenith at Kyoto. The treaty appears to have foundered. Those nations signed up to it do not appear to have the political will or the policy instruments to enable them to meet their obligations, while nations not signed up continue to generate CO2 unrestricted.

The macro-bureaucratic, geo-political, regulatory approach epitomised by Kyoto to solving environmental problems has probably had its day. If we are successfully to preserve our environment, we have to recognise that as human beings we are by their nature agents of economic development. Policies should reconcile the need to conserve with the need to develop; sustainable development should mean treating environmental and economic aims with equal respect. Policies that nurture sustainable development must above all take account of micro-economic forces and be founded on a recognition that we tend to act in a way which benefits very small groups - ourselves as individuals, our families or our neighbourhoods - upon which the success of our enterprises relies.

Every continent faces its own particular challenges in reconciling development with sustainability. When the Kenyan government banned the slaughter of elephants for ivory, the law of unintended consequences kicked into action - in the form of elephants trampling whole villages as elephant population numbers spiralled out of control. The policy has resulted in such devastation that some Kenyans regard elephants as pests rather than as a natural resource.

Compare that with a more enlightened approach to elephant conservation pursued by several southern African governments. Working with the grain of human economic nature, they have granted ownership of, and responsibility for, elephants to particular groups of individuals. By appealing to

their self-interest and giving ownership of the elephants, elephant owners work to preserve the animals in sustainable numbers.

The European Union has for 40 years operated a Common Fisheries Policy designed to run European commercial fishing on a sustainable basis, but this policy has failed to deliver either environmental sustainability or development of the fishing industry.

Contrast this with the property-rights based approach of New Zealand where the government recognised that by giving people a vested interest in maintaining a resource, they will fight to preserve it. A limited number of fishermen were given the perpetual right to fish, a right which could be handed down the generations. Parents who want their children and grandchildren to benefit from fishing the seas are unlikely to overfish them.

Iceland has also adopted a successful market-oriented approach whereby individual tradeable quotas allow individual fisheries to extract certain defined quantities of fish each year. Because the quotas are tradeable, they tend to be sold to the most efficient fleets; hence efficiency and sustainability go hand in hand.

New technology can be applied to make more efficient use of the Earth's natural resources. But none of the innovation needed for sustainable development will be possible if governments pursue policies of telling farmers in every detail how they must farm their crops. This, alongside a bloated subsidy regime, is the legacy of the Common Agricultural Policy.

If the evidence shows that central diktat is incapable of fostering sustainable development, what role does that leave for national governments and the well-staffed international bodies that they fund to save the planet? This means recognising sustainable development is a process, not an outcome; that you have to work with the grain of the human instincts; that adapting market institutions and mechanisms for environmental sustainability works better than closing down markets; that lifting people out of poverty can have beneficial environmental side-effects; and that we have to work with the world as it is today, rather than dreaming of how it might be in the ideal world of the politician.

• UK centre-right MEP Syed Kamall is a member of the Parliament's committee on international trade.

Two MEPs debate how to achieve the goal of sustainable development.
Article is part of a European Voice Special Report, 'Sustainable Development'.