Towards a Green and Collaborative European recovery

Submitted by Tedora Aibu on 25 June 2020

Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 22 June 2020 

In collaboration with DG GROW, European Commission, the European Clusters Alliance organised a special session on the green and collaborative European recovery. Ulla Engelmann from DG GROW introduced EU industrial strategy based on three main pillars: Green Transition, Global Competitiveness and Digital Transition.  In this framework, the Recovery Package called “Next Generation EU” is rolled out to suppor Members State to recover, kick-start the economy and help private investments, and learn the lessons from the crisis. It is clear that Europe needs a digital sector that puts sustainability and growth at its hearth. Digitisation is presenting new opportunities for monitoring and optimising how energy and natural resources are consumed. 

Ismo Ulvila from DG CLIMA introduced the European Green Deal. The main idea of this programme is to transform EU economy for a sustainable future and leaving no one behind. In order to join these results, it is important to design a set of deeply transformative policies and mainstreaming sustainability in all EU policies. Linked to the European Green Deal, the European Climate law will include the new 2030 target. Another important action is the EU Climate Pact, that formulates new proposals of green action for a climate-neutral world and will include feedback from a public consultation, which was open until June 17.

Oceane Peiffer-Smadjia from DG GROW presented the European Resource Efficiency Knowledge Centre (EREK), a network formed by 250 green tech cluster across the Europe. The EREK Knowledge Base covers 11 sectors of the industry in order to share more than 400 good practices, 130 measures, 80 technologies and more than 370 programmes helping companies to save water, carbon, materials, waste and energy including investment costs.  

Ander Elgorriaga, from IHOBE, the Basque Government’s Eco-Innovation Agency, shared their experience during the crisis.  IHOBE creates design instruments for the economy and the market and supports their implementation, develops the knowledge, supports policy design, reinforces private public collaboration and transfers and analyses the effective cost and mix evaluation. The crisis has generated a stop for investment, unemployment, unequal economic impact, uncertainty and a lack of global stability. Therefore, a phoning for the Green Deal and for COVID-19 with EU financial implication is needed.

Henning H. Sittel  presented the Efficiency Agency North Rhine-Westphalia, an agency founded by the Ministry  of Environment, Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Consumer Protection of the State of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, with the aim to improve competitiveness of SMEs by supporting a strategy of sustainable growth. Resource efficiency in eco-design and production processes is a key factor for sustainable growth.

Kaspar Nielsen from Cluster Excellence Denmark illustrated how circular economy can be a way to reignite the post Covid-19 economy. The main need is to rethinking innovation. The next step can be divided in three blocks: (i) preparation of a quick survey on cluster organisations to gain insights on their experiences with circular economy; (ii) online workshop; and (iii) follow-up in order to gathering the lesson learned and give easy to read recommendation for cluster policy. Following, Marisa Fernandez Soler highlighted the VIDA approach, which includes support to SMEs, the activation of cross-sectoral collaboration and the activation of cross-fertilization. 

During the session, the concept of circular economy was analysed in practice, focusing on how to reshoring and shortening values chain at local level. Pierre Gaudillat from the Joint Research Centre emphasised that the globalised offshoring logic of the supply chain has been disrupted for different reasons - not only because of the Covid-19 crisis, but also because of trade wars and China’s current policies.

To boost the green recovery of European Industry and helping clusters and their members to become more resource efficient, the ECCP entered a new partnership with EREK in collaboration with Joint Research Centre. The new platform will contain activities from the ECCP, but will go further to offer services to the whole cluster community.

Patrick Vuillermoz, from the cluster Plastipolis and representing the European Clusters Alliance, illustrated how cluster support the post Covid recovery, share information and common practices in Europe. The community gives quick responses at companies and the clusters represents key agents for a sustainable economic recovery.

A recording of the session is available here 

These are the complete minutes of the meeting:

20200622 ECA dailyminutes_v2.pdf

 

These are the presentations from the participants:

20200622 1 DG_GROW Ulla Engelmann - Green Recovery.pdf 20200622 2 EUGD_Clima_Law_Clusters.pdf 20200622 3 EREK_22.06.2020-2.pdf 20200622 4 Ihobe Green Recovery Webinar.pdf 20200622 5 NRW DG Grow ECA Webinar EFA_NRW_2020-06-22_en.pdf 20200622 6 Kaspar_Nielsen_CE_CED.pdf 20200622 7 VIDA_green_collaborative_EU_recovery_MF.pdf 20200622 8 JRC ECA_Green_Recov-EREK_JRC_pres.pdf 20200622 9 ECCP - Green Recovery - rev2.pdf 20200622 10 Plastipolis - ECA Green recovery session June22_2020 Plastipolis v1.pdf

Find information on the previous meetings hereinformation on the upcoming agenda here 

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