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How to accelerate change towards sustainability?

News Published 10 Sep 2019 Last modified 06 Sep 2019
1 min read
Photo: © Eszter Barbara Bakó, My City /EEA
There is growing recognition that achieving prosperity within environmental limits requires fundamental changes in core systems of production and consumption. A new European Environment Agency (EEA) report, published today, identifies ten focus areas for enabling sustainability transitions.

The EEA report ‘Sustainability transitions: policy and practice’ identifies policy options for responding to systemic environmental and climate problems in Europe and globally. The report sets out 10 sets of messages for policy, outlining how governments and other actors can enable systemic change towards long-term sustainability goals.

Focusing in particular on Europe’s food, energy and mobility systems, the report illustrates the importance of promoting diverse innovations — social practices, business models, technologies — that can trigger new ways of living and thinking. It points to the critical need to empower cities as hubs of innovation and networking, to reorient financial flows towards sustainable and transformative innovations, to navigate inevitable surprises and trade-offs, and to ensure socially fair outcomes.

The report also emphasises that achieving sustainability transitions requires that all policy areas and levels of government operate together to harness the creativity and power of citizens, businesses and communities. Environment and climate policy tools remain essential but transforming systems also requires coherent contributions from many other areas, ranging from research and innovation, industry, competition and trade, to employment, education and welfare.

Background

The new report is part of the Agency’s continuing work on sustainability transitions, which builds on the conclusions of the EEA’s last five-yearly assessment, European environment — state and outlook report 2015 (SOER 2015).

Key EEA publications on this theme include ‘Perspectives on transitions to sustainability’, which presents an overview of framings, conceptualisations and analytical tools relating to the topic, and ‘Sustainability transitions — Now for the long term’, which presents case studies on actions already under way at local levels in Europe. 

The EEA will publish its next five-yearly assessment, SOER 2020 in December 2019.

Related content

Related publications

Publication Sustainability transitions: policy and practice This report aims to go beyond theoretical discussions to explore the practical implications of transitions research for policy and practice, building on the insights from past assessments. It highlights the growing links to established EU policy frameworks and identifies how transitions thinking is being operationalised at different scales across Europe. Co-authored by leading experts in transitions studies, the report has also benefited strongly from interactions with EEA partners in multiple policy areas, in particular, at a workshop co-hosted with the European Commission's European Political Strategy Centre in July 2018.
Publication Perspectives on transitions to sustainability The overall ambition of this report is to provide an initial analytical overview of framings, conceptualisations and selected analytical tools relating to sustainability transitions and transformations, bringing together insights from multiple academic communities. The report aims to illustrate how these different perspectives relate to each other and to begin to explore what potential guidance they offer for policymaking and governance more broadly.
Publication Sustainability transitions: Now for the long term This report was developed in cooperation with the European Environment Information and Observation Network (Eionet) — a partnership network of the EEA and its member and cooperating countries involving more than 1 000 experts and 350 national institutions across Europe. Drawing on evidence collected from across the network, the report represents an initial attempt to explore what the concepts of sustainability transitions and transformations mean in practice, and how the EEA and Eionet can help develop the knowledge needed to support systemic change in Europe. Case studies are used to explain and illustrate key concepts and to give a sense of what activities are already under way at local levels. The report concludes with reflections from the EEA's Scientific Committee and Executive Director, which provide further insights into the new knowledge needs and the potential role of the EEA and Eionet in responding to them.

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For references, please go to https://eea.europa.eu./highlights/how-to-accelerate-change-towards-sustainability or scan the QR code.

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