South-East Europe in Evolution by Hanappi Hardy;

Author:Hanappi, Hardy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1775361
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Evaluation

Given that countries in the region are either current or potential members of the European Union and that European environmental policy is abided by member countries to a greater extent, this section will critically engage with the said policy and generate some future scenarios for the environmental prospects of the region.

The literature seems to be in agreement that European environmental policy is geared to a few of the most rapidly expanding areas of the Union, addressing issues, inter alia, greenhouse gas emissions trading, production standards, biosafety, recycling and eco-labelling. With a large body of regulations that provide tight frameworks for member countries, the Union now possesses, no doubt, the most advanced environmental legislation in the world. Furthermore, the Union is also known to have played an important role at the international level as well, including the three Environmental Summits that took place respectively in 1992 (Rio), 2002 (Johannesburg) and 2012 (Rio), and took the lead in the Kyoto protocol and in the 2010 Cancun Climate Change Summit. Lately, the Union produced the Green Economy Roadmap that shaped many discussions during the 2012 Rio Summit.20

Although environmental policy is a relatively recent policy area for the EU (note, for instance, that there was no mention of environmental issues in the 1958 Treaty of Rome), starting with the 1982 Single European Act, environmental protection has increasingly became a key issue. With the Treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997) and Lisbon (2007), constant reference has been made to sustainable development as one of the central objectives of the Union. It is at this juncture that we need to engage with the concept of sustainable development, since it is an oft-used term with different interpretations.

In a nutshell, the policy aims to improve water quality, address air and noise pollution, set standards for chemicals and waste disposal, and conserve wildlife and vegetation. Lately, European environmental policy has been emphasising renewable energy (by committing the EU to a 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020) and created an emissions trading system that aims to control CO2 production. Clearly, all these policies have improved and will continue to improve environmental performance in the member countries, and indeed the Environmental Performance index discussed above indicates that member countries, and especially the EU-15, enjoy very high rankings (the “four big” members, Germany, UK, France and Italy, rank eleventh, ninth, sixth and eighth, respectively).

Examining the current strategy of the Union as outlined in the Green Economy Roadmap, which shaped many discussions since its publication, a central idea comes to the fore: to make the European economy more resource-efficient. Its aim, therefore, seems to be to unlink economic growth and natural resource use. More specifically, the Roadmap calls for a more climate-friendly and less energy-consuming European economy, by, inter alia, boosting economy-wide policy reform that would enable green investment (especially in the energy, transport, agriculture and waste industries). At a more operational level, the Roadmap calls for raising the “resource productivity index”, which is a measure of the total amount of

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