Sustainability in CEE

The European Green Deal is the region’s strategy for bringing about a more sustainable EU economy. 

It provides a growth and development strategy that addresses the rising threats of climate change and environmental degradation, and aims to be climate neutral by 2050. According to the European Commission, the deal hopes to transform the EU into an economy where: 

• There are net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 

• Economic growth is decoupled from resource use 

• No person and no place is left behind. 

The Commission proposed a number of measures – including new taxonomies, regulations and legal frameworks, and financial packages which will support EU Member States in the green transition, and this will have a spill-over effect for non-EU states in the region, too. The green transition is based on clean technologies and innovative solutions as a driving force for a competitive European economy. Measures are put in place to make sure that such disruptive changes will allow all European regions to grow and to ensure the transition towards sustainable paths. 

The measures touch a wide range of sectors and topics, including: 

• biodiversity - measures to protect our fragile ecosystem

• from Farm to Fork - ways to ensure more sustainable food systems

• sustainable agriculture - sustainability in EU agriculture and rural areas thanks to the common agricultural policy (CAP)

• sustainable industry - ways to ensure more sustainable, more environmentally-respectful production cycles

• building and renovating - the need for a cleaner construction sector, among many others.

Altogether 17 SDGs are at the heart of the United Nations’ (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address the most important global challenges and provide a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for citizens. Partnerships are an essential mechanism for making progress and achieving prosperity across all sectors and stakeholders. 

With less than ten years left to achieve the Global Goals, and with the regression in SDG targets due to the COVID-19 outbreak, stakeholders are under pressure to rethink how to respond, adapt and contribute to ensure the fulfilment of their commitments toward a sustainable path. Reaching a world where equity, prosperity, opportunities, partnerships, synergies and sustainability are at the center requires national governments to play a central role. In turn civil societies, the private sector and international organizations will need to play co-driver roles. 

Due to the complexity and interconnectivity of development challenges, solutions should be multi-sectoral and include multiple stakeholders. SDG needs to receive inputs from all essential stakeholders to lead to concrete and effective policies and solutions. Once collaboration is secured institutions will need to revise strategic level plans, plan funding and financing and operationalise SDG strategies into projects.

Direct and indirect effects of the outbreak are giving rise to unprecedented social and economic challenges around the world. Business continuity, supply chain disruptions, changes in demands and commodity prices, combined with high levels of uncertainty and volatility of the financial markets, are just a few of the externalities impacting economies, lives and livelihoods. 

Governments and public sector institutions are at the centre of the coordination, establishment and implementation of efforts to recover better. The solutions reaped should help ensure the sustainable rebuild of societies that are more resilient to future challenges.

In order to build resilient societies, stakeholders need to consider lessons learned from the pandemic.  To rethink, reconfigure and reconstruct in a better way, governments and public sector stakeholders must be coordinators, enablers and planners for integrative long-lasting response and recovery.  Resilient public sector policies should integrate a multi-sectoral and multi-actor approach that includes the vision and aims of the civil societies, private sector and international organizations. Complex challenges require comprehensive solutions that have vision and are implemented collaboratively.