The UN Copenhagen climate change summit should be a seminal political moment in the 21st century. Of course, the task of getting binding commitments from countries across the globe to cut carbon emissions is daunting. President Obama, and the leaders of China and India, have still yet to confirm that they will attend the conference, but the news that the US is set to announce a target to reduce its 2005 CO2 emissions by between 15-20 per cent by 2020, is a huge step in the right direction. More than 60 heads of state and government will attend the conference. The stakes are high.

But the Copenhagen conference also reminds us that the fields of environment and climate change are among the biggest policy areas that are predominantly dealt with at EU rather than national level. Indeed since the things that affect the environment, like pollution to the water, air and sea and our climate do not respect national frontiers, policy action, for an EU member state, can only really be effectively taken at EU or world level.

More specifically, taking common actions to combating climate change (unless you are among the small minority that thinks it’s all just a myth) is arguably the single biggest challenge of the 21st century. That is why it is so important that, with the US and other emerging economic giants like China and India behind the game on carbon emissions, the EU leads the way at Copenhagen and speaks with one strong, united voice.

The EU has consistently led the world on climate change. It was instrumental in securing the Kyoto protocol in the late 1990s and then in persuading Russia to sign it. The Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) was then established at EU level to ensure that member states could meet their Kyoto requirements. In December 2007 in Bali, world leaders offered tentative agreement to creating a successor to Kyoto. The Copenhagen climate conference has been the main issue facing the European Commission and the European Parliament’s environment committee on which I am Malta’s representative.

MEPs, especially in my ENVI committee, have consistently shown the political will to match, and arguably surpass, the rhetoric of government leaders. Last December a package of legislation was agreed that will help deliver a 20 per cent cut in Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. This included a revision of the ETS, binding national emissions targets for all member states; the renewable energy directive to increase the use of renewables such as hydro power, solar, wind and geothermal from seven per cent to 20 per cent by 2020; and legislation to ensure that cars and fuel emit less CO2. However, the new legislation will need to be fully implemented by the new Parliament and will continue to evolve, hopefully as a result of the negotiations in Copenhagen at the end of this year.

We should also see tackling climate change as a golden economic opportunity. The EU is the world’s largest single market, and its e120 billion budget should enable us to increase investment in research and development, energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. Other countries have already seen the potential of the renewable energy sector – Germany’s renewables sector has already created around 200,000 jobs and e16bn per year in turnover. As I observed in my report commissioned by the ETC, the environment sector is a fast growing sector. Malta should therefore seize the opportunity to build a ‘green new deal’, particularly at a time of financial crisis.

But tackling climate change is not the only environmental field where the Parliament matters to Malta. For example, as a previous member of the Maltese Sustainable Development Commission from 2002-04, I feel that this policy area has, relatively speaking, been neglected at European level in recent years. Over the coming weeks and months the EU is mandated to review the EU’s Sustainable Development Strategy and draw up a new ‘road-map’ of priority areas. Certainly, I will use my position to urge the Commission into action, as it is important that sustainable development is a high political priority and does not disappear from the agenda because of the financial crisis.

In other words, while the Copenhagen conference will be the centre-piece of the EU’s work in environment protection and climate change, there are many other important (though less media headlines grabber) policy challenges ahead. In so many ways, Copenhagen is the beginning – not the end – of the political road.



Prof. Edward Scicluna is a Labour MEP