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Case study Main messages
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Credit: Shutterstock/ Erni
• The pan-European region is in the initial stages of greening its economy, pioneering transformative system solutions where economic performance, environmental quality, and human well-being are enhanced through reduced use of natural resources. The development of closed-loop, circular-economies with substantially reduced environmental footprints are starting to gain momentum. Bio-solutions that link the production and use of renewable biological resources and waste streams to food, feed, clothing, other bio-based products and bioenergy, are of increasing interest to businesses. Yet achieving a healthy planet and healthy people requires more urgent transformation of the current systems of production and consumption that most contribute to environmental degradation and societal inequalities, such as food, energy and mobility.
• Several global megatrends are expected to most affect the longer-term environmental outlook of the pan-European region: demographic change, increasing urbanization, global competition for resources, climate change and the implications of an increasingly multipolar world. Some of these trends offer opportunities for new innovations, others increase the risks of resource scarcities and conflicts. The complexity of ecosystems can mean considerable time lags between reduced pressures and restored functions. The crossing of planetary boundaries are adding new elements of risk for which both the developed and the transitional countries of the region are largely unprepared.
• Pan-European outlooks suggest in particular the need to halve material resource use in Western Europe and stabilize it elsewhere in the region. Other outlooks point to: increasing pressure on water resources across the whole region and water stress in Southern Europe and Central Asia; continued biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystems and the services they provide, increased burden of disease and significant levels of premature deaths due to ambient air pollution; and acute climate change impacts. Increasing policy coherence and integrated interventions across these areas could improve the longer-term outlook overall.
• The challenges faced by the region are increasingly systemic, complex, interdependent and uncertain. Achieving progress under greater uncertainty needs coalitions between government institutions, businesses and civil society, to agree on pathways for tackling different societal risks. Vertical coordination between national and local policy levels will be instrumental in accelerating the needed systems transitions. These transitions should be focused on creating meaningful employment and eliminating poverty, while rebuilding the environmental resources and services on which future pan-European sustainability will depend.
• The SDGs provide a strategic framework within which environmental policy in the region can contribute to transition processes as well as provide a mechanism for strengthening regional adaptive capacities and resilience. Operationalizing the SDGs will require ambitious quantitative targets and indicators so that progress towards sustainability can be tracked properly to ensure convergence towards a shared regional vision and ambition within planetary boundaries.
4.1 Setting the scene
4.1.1 Ecosystem health and human well-being as key policy objectives
The pan-European outlook examines two projections to 2030 through the lens of the regional environmental priorities
including natural resource consumption and waste, water, biodiversity and ecosystems, air quality and climate change, in relation to ecosystem health and human well-being. One is a business-as-usual (BAU) projection based on current policies and the other an alternative development projection that envisages achieving the outcomes of the Multilateral
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Chapter 4: Outlooks and Emerging Issues
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