The EU Sustainable Development Strategy

Sustainable development is unquestionably one of the overarching principles and top priorities of the EU. Some decisive measures have been taken in the last years such as the adoption in Göteborg of the strategy for sustainable development enabling an environmental dimension to be incorporated into the Lisbon strategy.
Economic, social and environmental aspects must now be addressed on an equal footing. Yet sustainable development goes beyond this. It means radically changing some of the most negative trends by decoupling economic growth from resource use.
UEAPME contributes to the efforts deployed in this field and in particular actions revolving around changing our current consumption and production patterns and environmental technologies.

Position Papers, presentations

• November 2004: Response to the public consultation on the review of the EU SDS


• November 2004: UEAPME Presentation - European Stakeholder meeting on Sustainable Consumption and Production - Ostend - 25 November 2004

The Lisbon Strategy

Small businesses have a major role to play in the Lisbon strategy and UEAPME is closely involved in a number of initiatives in the field of the environment relating to the strategy.

Projects, partnerships

Best Project on streamlining and simplification of environment-related regulatory requirements for companies

UEAPME has for many years highlighted the need for a simplification of the EC environmental legislation. The creation of a friendly regulatory environment is also fundamental to the Lisbon strategy and continuous efforts are needed to lower unnecessary costs of doing business and to remove red tape.

In this framework DG Enterprise initiated a BEST project on streamlining and simplification of environment-related regulatory requirements for companies, in which UEAPME participated as SME representative.

The project aimed at:

• Identifying good/best practices from the variety of existing national/regional simplification and streamlining measures so as to provide policy-makers with an overview of experiences in the EU.
• Identifying criteria for good/best practices in the field of administrative simplification with regard to the implementation of environment policy and implementation.
• Where possible, identifying elements for success.
• Making recommendations to the EU, Member States and business stakeholders.

A final conference to present the results of the project was organised on 22nd June 2006 in Brussels. Please click here to see the report with the final recommendations.

Partnership for a Clean, Clever, Competitive Europe

During the Environmental Council of 20 December 2004 the Dutch Presidency of the EU launched a dialogue aimed at setting up a partnership among different stakeholders at EU level (EU Commission, Member States, business organisations, among which UEAPME, and environmentalists) in order to achieve a “Clean, Clever and Competitive Europe”.

The objective of this dialogue was to identify ways of improving the production and the dissemination of eco-efficient technologies in the EU and the export to third countries as an important way to achieve the Lisbon target. To this end an Eminent Persons Group was set up in the second half of 2005 with representatives of all the partners (UEAPME was represented by Mr. Giorgio Russomanno, Chairman of its Environment Committee) in order to send a clear message to the European Spring Council in March 2006.

Please click here to download the report with the recommendations agreed upon by the Eminent Persons Group.

Please have a look at the official site of the “Clean, Clever, Competitive” partnership for more information on the initiative:

http://www.cleanclevercompetitive.com