Green targets for competitive edge

The original Lisbon agenda was to make Europe "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion and respect for the environment by 2010..."

Rather than talking of a failed process, published studies show that there have been as many successes as failures.

The fact that progress has been less than desirable just emphasises the need to redouble efforts over the coming decade as we now focus on the new EU2020 agenda.

A recent score card table published by the Centre For Economic Reform shows that Malta not only still has a long way to go in this regard but also that it has remained the laggard when it comes to assessing the Lisbon League table in terms of Overall Lisbon Performance. In fact, while Sweden retained its top post of 2008 in 2009 with Austria moving up to second place from its fourth ranking in 2008, in both successive years Malta was at the very bottom 27th place, faring even worse than Bulgaria and Romania.

In a list of heroes and villains, in spite of a marginal improvement since 2001, we are there among the villains particularly in the employment and social inclusion sector, especially when it comes to bringing people into the work force.

As many know, the key elements of the Lisbon agenda were, and remain, innovation, liberalisation, enterprise, employment and social inclusion as well as sustainable development and the environment.

Sustainable development became an added objective to the Lisbon agenda during the Swedish EU presidency of 2001.

In this regard the EU is aiming to reconcile its aspirations for higher economic growth with the need to fulfill its international environment commitments such as the Kyoto greenhouse gas targets.

While Malta fared well in the ICT sector, I have my doubts how successful we have been in achieving the strong correlation that others managed to achieve between their levels of investment in ICT and their rates of growth in labour productivity.

The EU experience has shown that it is not enough for institutions to simply invest in ICT: they must also make organisational changes if they are to realise the full benefits of new technology. A quick look at the heroes and villains in this area explains it all: heroes - Finland, The Netherlands, Sweden; villains - Greece, Italy, Spain.

Innovation rightly sits at the heart of debates over economic growth. In the developed economies, sustained economic growth is dependent on productivity growth, which in turn requires innovation of one sort or another.

The need to raise the innovative capacity of EU economies is now even more pressing than it was in 2000. Without improved productivity, EU governments will struggle to cope with the impact of population ageing on public finances, and living standards will stagnate or even start to fall.

Making transport more environmentally sustainable will be one of the biggest challenges ahead. Perhaps the greatest disappointment has been the failure of EU countries to set the transport sector on a more environmentally sustainable footing so far. Transport is the only sector of the European economy in which greenhouse gas emissions have increased over the past decade. Transport now accounts for almost a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in the EU27. On current trends, emissions from transport alone will exceed the EU target for all sectors in 2050. During the course of this year, the EU Commission will publish a White Paper on the future of transport policy.

The EU was right to include environmental targets in the Lisbon Agenda. There is no trade-off between economic growth and ambitious environmental standards. Although anything that encourages European businesses to adopt energy-efficient technologies will stand them in good stead in a world of increasing energy scarcity, unfortunately, the Lisbon agenda's environmental targets were neglected from the start, and there has been little attempt to integrate the environmental targets into the overall strategy and to demonstrate the economic benefits of a move to a low carbon economy.

This will need to change in the EU2020 programme.

As a start, stronger regulation will also be needed in order to meet the emission targets for the sectors not covered by the ETS, which are targeted to reduce emissions by 10 per cent between 2005 and 2020.

This is an area which can prove to be tricky indeed for Malta, particularly in the transport sector. But much more will also have to be done to promote energy efficiency particularly in buildings, which account for about 50 per cent of the EU's energy use. The fact that we are already 16 months late in the implementation process, should give us cause for concern.

The EU must demonstrate that environmental targets will be a source of competitive advantage and that failing to meet them would cause long-term economic damage. It must challenge the misleading portrayal of regulatory standards as a "cost" to be borne by business rather than as an incentive to use energy more efficiently and to invest in new technologies.

Mr Brincat is the shadow minister for the environment, sustainable development and climate change.