Then, thirdly, the overuse of natural resources , including the loss of bio-diversity. I personally see moving to a more resource-efficient and less wasteful way of producing and consuming as a major economic opportunity. As I said, we have selected these problems as they have a major socio-economic impact and will affect future generations if we do not act now. We also have to look at ways to improve our capacity for designing coherent and long-term policies which maximise synergies between different objectives and prevent unsustainable developments from arising in the first place. This is our current roadmap.
Environmental objectives are obviously about reversing and avoiding environmental degradation.
But less obviously they are about enabling economic prosperity. There are two sides to this. Firstly, what could be seen as the negative side, in the sense of taking into account the costs of environmental damage or the costs of inaction . For example, sometimes we hear the argument that complying with the Kyoto Protocol will be expensive. The costs of letting climate change happen will be greater.