'Green' innovation can stimulate EU competitiveness, concludes Environment Council
Europe can strengthen its competitiveness and contribute to achieving the Lisbon goal by stimulating and adopting eco-friendly innovations, concluded EU environment ministers during an informal meeting of the Environment Council in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on 18 July. The Council agreed that by applying 'green' innovations, the EU will not only avoid the high social and environmental costs of inaction, but will also capitalise on the economic benefits of cost saving, creating new markets and improving the quality of products, thus giving Europe a strong competitive edge. 'This message should be an essential part of the well focused and appealing contribution of the Environment Council to the review of the Lisbon process,' argued ministers in their conclusions. Former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, who is chairing the mid-term review of the Lisbon agenda, was at the meeting to listen to the discussions, along with representatives from European business and environmental organisations. The Council noted that Europe is already the worldwide leader in ecologically efficient products, but warned that 'there are still too few innovations which are actually put on the market.' The main obstacle for such products is insufficient market penetration for green technologies, and ministers argued that national and EU measures should be developed to give eco-friendly innovations a 'fair and competitive market perspective'. Proposed measures put forward by the Environment Council include public procurement policies aimed at stimulating the market for environmental products and technologies. 'On average, approximately 14 per cent of the expenditures in the EU Member States are made by the governments. Thus the government is an important participant in the market and can stimulate new, environmentally friendly trends through its spending policies,' ministers concluded. The Council cited the example of the Netherlands, where only water-based paints are used for governmental buildings, and suggested that if public authorities purchased LED lamps and LCD computer screens, a significant amount of energy would also be saved. Other possible policy measures include the introduction of fiscal incentives and green investment criteria to encourage private companies to embrace eco-friendly products. The internalisation of external costs for environmentally unsound products and the reform of environmentally harmful subsidies are also important in order to establish the right price signals, the Council added. Alongside such policy measures, the Environment Council also acknowledged that 'focused long-term research and development efforts are crucial to further develop new innovations.' Ministers called for clear and ambitious long term targets to be set in order to drive innovation. Finally, ministers from the 25 EU Member States stressed that a joint effort with the private sector is needed in order to fully grasp the benefits of eco friendly innovations. Strong support for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) through the provision of risk capital and capacity building is needed to cement their role in the innovation process, and the pro-activity of businesses should be strengthened by rewarding front runners and benchmarking environmentally friendly performance.
Countries
Netherlands