By Lilian Crastan
Voters will begin to learn who will be representing them in the European Parliament beginning from tomorrow as results of the EU wide election start coming in and the bloc’s policies over the next five years start taking shape.
In the months leading up to this week’s elections, a draft of the EU strategic agenda – a list of political priorities for the next five years – showed a shift away from prioritizing climate action. Unlike the EU Agenda of 2019, which focused on the Green Deal, the October 2023 draft focused on security, migration, and competitiveness, omitting direct mention of environmental issues.
A more extensive draft of the strategic plan for 2024-2029 that leaked in April 2024 confirmed these priorities, with the only mention of the environment being encapsulated in the bullet point “Prepare for the new realities stemming from climate change.”. A substantial emphasis on defense mobilization and spending responds to the threatening geopolitical issues the EU is facing.
Although a new strategic agenda will be officially adopted later this month, after the elections, Brooke Moore, a policy analyst at the Brussels-based Sustainable Prosperity for Europe Programme at the European Policy Centre, voiced concerns about the EU’s direction: “Climate change is kind of removed from this conversation altogether in that sense. When it comes to competitiveness, we need nature, we need biodiversity, we need all of these factors. When it comes to security, climate change is also a major security risk.”
In March, the European Environment Agency published a Risk Assessment for the EU that suggested European policies are not keeping pace with the growing risks of climate change: “If decisive action is not taken now, most climate risks identified could reach critical or catastrophic levels by the end of this century.”
Moore said this is worrying as EU policies are “being hampered not only by pauses [on action] but also by actual rollbacks.” She added that member states need to have serious conversations about the trade-offs that will be necessary to avert such catastrophic change.
Feature Image: Constitution of the 9th legislature of the European Parliament. Photo Credit: European Parliament/Flickr.