What’sEUp: The first timid but crucial steps of sufficiency in Brussels
“We need to create an environment where daily decisions will be climate-sound because they are cheaper, safer, quicker”
Ada Amon– Chief Advisor to the Mayor of Budapest on Climate Affairs
This is how Ada Amon summed up the sufficiency approach at the European Sustainable Energy Week last June. Cities do have a major role to play in rethinking their organization, public services, and climate policies to reduce their consumption of resources (water, materials, land, energy…). Cities are also the ones providing the conditions to enable citizens to make resource-wise choices … sometimes without even realising how good they are for the climate! For example, in Denmark people choose to bike every day because of health, time, convenience, and cost related reasons.
Sufficiency is a superpower for cities to shape their ecological transition in a fair way. We explained it in our glossary, available here.
But cities need a clear direction, a good legislative framework, and appropriate financing and research programs to make a sufficiency-based climate approach. Let’s take a look at how sufficiency has been addressed at the European level in the past few months.
Sufficiency is (slowly) finding its way in Brussels
Sufficiency has been the gaining ground in Brussels in recent months:
CLEVER, a European network led by the French association négaWatt, has landed the SER (sufficiency, efficiency, renewable) approach in Brussels, proposing a scenario for achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Let’s hope that the European Commission, which is currently building the models for its 2040 climate targets, will take a look!
Other initiatives, such as the European climate neutrality observatory (ECNO), highlighted the need to reduce our pressure on resources, particularly materials and energy.
A session on energy sufficiency was also led by MEP Bas Eickhout during the Beyond Growth conference at the European Parliament last May.
Finally, Energy Cities co-organised a session on the untapped potential of sufficiency to achieve climate neutrality at the European Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) in June 2023 with participants from the European Commission, experts of the field, and local authorities’ representatives. After 17 years of EUSEW, this was the first session to call on the European Commission and future members of the European Parliament to make sufficiency a priority from the start of their new mandate in 2024, and to support local authorities in embarrassing the sufficiency approach.
The «Fit for 55» legislative package: very timid on sufficiency
Unfortunately, sufficiency is not mainstreamed in the Fit for 55 legislative package that aims at reducing EU’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. Nevertheless, a sufficiency approach can be spotted in some of its parts:
The Ecodesign Regulation, which aims to facilitate the durability and repairability of products, is one of the first texts in this direction.
The European Parliament proposed a definition of sufficiency in the recast of the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD), encouraging Member States to reduce the number of unoccupied buildings and use brownfield sites. Members of the European Parliament also proposed that local and regional authorities draft integrated renovation programs using both circularity and sufficiency principles. Negotiations on the EPBD are still running. Energy Cities clearly is encouraging legislators to keep a sufficiency approach in the final text expected for the end of 2023.
The energy price crisis in 2022 has also triggered targets and measures to drastically reduce energy consumption. Such measures are detailed in the EU ‘save Energy’ communication and the joint commission-IEA “playing my part” campaign (e.g. reducing temperature, choosing public transport or active mobility, working from home, reducing lighting use …). These measures have shown that a rapid reduction in resource consumption is possible. It is now a question of doing it in a structural and fair way, without burdening the most vulnerable.
However, we regret that sufficiency is not considered in any of the main strategic texts of the EU. There is no mention of it in the European Climate Law, nor in one of the 5 pillars of the Energy Union, or in the Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action, that defines what Member States put into their national plans and strategies. Sufficiency is also absent from the SECAPs developed by the signatory cities of the Covenant of Mayors.
What’s next?
There’s a long way to go before Europe’s legislators recognise sufficiency is fundamental to the success of our ecological transition. Energy Cities will work in that direction to make sure that during the next mandate of the European institutions, European cities can benefit from a clear vision and a strong support mechanism to develop sufficiency-based policies.
This What’sEUp article is supported by ADEME. Subscribe to the “resource-wise and socially just local economies” hub newsletter to read future articles on this topic.
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