Debate: General Union Environment Action Programme to
Date: WEDNESDAY, 7 JULY 2021
Speaker: Grace O'Sullivan
Country: Greece
Language: EN

The eighth Environment Action Programme has the potential to play an important role in decision-making on the environment over the next decade – the critical decade for environmental action. Nobody knows that more than our Greens adviser Joanna Sprackett and my assistant Rose Ní Chleirigh. They have both worked on this report with dedication, professionalism and commitment.  Honourable Members, I hope today that you too can show commitment. With this report, I call on you to face the real urgency for strong, effective environmental legislation in the EU and vote to support this report in its entirety. In November 2019, we in the European Parliament declared a climate and environment emergency. Since that headline-grabbing moment, in this same Parliament, we’ve heard countless lofty claims on tackling that emergency. We hear speeches that would give the great orators of history a run for their money. Speeches and declarations and grandiose plans that at face value would have us all believing that the climate and environment emergency is in hand, and that we’ll soon see, as the saying goes – everything rosy in the garden.  But as another saying goes – talk is cheap. We need less talk, more action and real change. We need immediate, comprehensive and sustained environmental action. But we also need more. We urgently need systemic change! The EU’s Environment Action Programme to 2030 can help deliver on those ambitions. It can help deliver in a way that is not loosely rooted in shallow rhetoric and empty promises. As a field ecologist, I recognise the biological and symbolic reality that shallow roots equal instability. This report has deep roots. This report is not just talk. It makes for far-reaching decade-long legislation that will help spur real action and systemic change. There is nothing shallow in the report’s long-term priority objective for 2050 at the latest: for citizens to live well within planetary boundaries. This report is on track with six environmental priorities for the EU from now to 2030: climate mitigation, climate adaptation, transitioning to a circular economy, achieving zero pollution, protecting and restoring biodiversity, and reducing the EU’s production and consumption footprint. These are essential requirements in the fight for a future. If we want to survive, the time to act is now. We have just a few short years of time, of hope. Unless we take ownership for our actions and make decisive moves today, humanity’s future on planet earth is in jeopardy. This report is constructive and ambitious around areas that have the potential to be transformative in people’s lives. GDP, for example, is not a meaningful measure of human and ecological wellbeing, and we know that the aim of eternal economic growth is fundamentally unsustainable. This report, therefore, puts forward a bold and timely proposal on transitioning beyond GDP to a sustainable wellbeing economy that puts the wellbeing of people and the planet at the heart of policy and decision-making. We also tackle the subject of environmentally harmful subsidies. We are engaged in useless tasks of running around in circles if we continue with contradictory talk of ambition, talk of reaching the SDGs, talk of living within the planetary boundaries while at the same time incentivising practices that are wrecking the planet. It’s simply wrong for governments to spend massive amounts of money on activities that heat the planet and destroy nature. Article 3 of this report sets concrete deadlines for ending all environmentally harmful subsidies in the EU, including fossil fuel subsidies. Deadlines that will bring certainty, predictability and accountability. Finally, the Commission presented the monitoring framework as the real added-value of the eighth Environmental Action Programme. But we know that monitoring is only effective if it goes hand in hand with political accountability. For this reason, Article 4 of this report lays down a monitoring – and governance – mechanism to ensure that progress made towards the Programme’s objectives is examined and discussed by political leaders every year, with corrective measures implemented when needed. Science tells us that we have just a few years before irreversible and catastrophic damage is done to our life-support system on earth. We need to get this planet back on a path to recovery, and for that to happen we need environmental protection, conservation and restoration on a massive scale, which must be part of broader systemic change. A vote for the full report that was adopted in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) is a vote for a serious, genuine conviction, and commitment to get us out of this crisis and ensure the survival of life on our planet and into the future.