Brussels, 05/06/2003 (Agence Europe) - More than 150 delegates from forty countries and ten ministers attended the international ministerial conference to promote renewable energy, held in Brussels on Tuesday during the European Commission's Green Week (see EUROPE of 31 May, p. 10). This was the first event at ministerial level of the members of the Johannesburg Renewable Energy Coalition (JREC) formed on the initiative of the EU by the World Sustainable Development Summit of September 2002. The JREC aims to get as many countries as possible to join the EU in wanting to set quantitative targets and deadlines for increasing the share of renewable energy in world energy supplies.
At a press conference part way through the conference, European Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström expressed satisfaction at the wide range of representatives attending the conference from business, energy and the environment and confidence in the coalition making progress (it is now made up of 80 countries, Botswana, Colombia, South Africa and the Gambia having recently joined). We have established a platform representing the different parts of the world and have started to identify obstacles still standing in the way of our objective, which is an important step towards achieving sustainable development, said the Commissioner. The obstacles she cited included fossil fuel subsidies (roundly criticised by delegates) and the way the cost of renewable energy is calculated compared with polluting energy.
We won't force all participants to agree on the same objectives or the same timetable. Our aim at this stage is to list the problems standing in the way of developing renewable energy and the opportunities provided by clean energy and to extend our knowledge by exchanging information about best practices and considering the best way to inform people about the role they can play by changing their behaviour as consumers.
Jürgen Trittin, German Green environment minister (Germany will be hosting the next international conference on renewable energy announced by Chancellor Schröder (Bonn, June 2004), pointed out that the process launched by the coalition had to take a bottom-up approach, ie start by setting targets for increasing the share of renewable energy first at domestic level, then regional and then global. The EU has given itself the target of doubling the share of renewable energy in total energy use by 2010. Its aim is to encourage the widest number of countries possible to follow suit in order to meet global targets in the long-term. For this it will be necessary to change the energy structure while minimising the social costs.
The aim of the Bonn Conference will be to further extend the coalition and, explained Jürgen Trittin, to form an action plan. This presupposes, he said, fair economic criteria, regulating subsidies, funding strategies, ideas about how to get the private sector on board, and tangible draft programmes for the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol clean development and joint implementation. Tritten explained that the stakes were enormous since increasing the share of renewable energy was not just an environmental issue or combating climate change, but a crucial issue for the economic growth of rich countries and eliminating poverty from developing countries (which spend 80% of the budget on purchasing energy). In other words, if it is met, the target pursued by the Jo'burg Renewable Energy Coalition will help achieve the millennium target of halving the number of poor in the world by 2015.
At the conference, the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) appealed to the EU to set an example by fixing clear targets and a deadline for increasing the share of renewable energy in the EU's total energy use to 25% by 2020.