A new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), published on Tuesday 10 September, identifies priority areas for action to enable sustainability transitions, i.e. fundamental changes in production and consumption systems, thus addressing systemic environmental and climate problems in Europe and worldwide.
Entitled "Sustainability transitions: policy and practice", it describes how governments and other actors can bring about systemic change towards long-term sustainability goals that achieve prosperity within environmental limits.
This report focuses in particular on Europe's food, energy and mobility systems and highlights the importance of promoting diverse innovations - in social practices, business models, technologies - that can trigger new ways of living and thinking.
It stresses the crucial need to empower cities to act as innovation hubs, to reorient financial flows towards sustainable and transformative innovations.
The report highlights that achieving sustainability transitions requires all policy areas and all levels of government to work together to harness the creativity and power of citizens, businesses and communities. Environmental and climate policy tools remain essential, but, the EEA stresses, the transformation of systems also requires coherent contributions from many other areas, such as research and innovation, industry, competition, trade, employment, education and welfare.
This report is based on the latest five-year assessment of the state of the environment in Europe by the EEA (State and Outlook Report 2015). The next assessment is expected in December 2019. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)