EU Commission: 2023 Strategic Foresight Report: sustainability and wellbeing at the heart of Europe’s Open Strategic Autonomy

Today, the European Commission presented the Strategic Foresight Report 2023, in which it looks at ways to put “sustainability and wellbeing at the heart of Europe’s Open Strategic Autonomy” and suggests concrete actions to achieve this aim. “The EU – a release explains – is engaged in a profound and ambitious transition to achieve climate neutrality and sustainability in the next few decades. This sustainability transition will be key to strengthen the EU’s Open Strategic Autonomy, ensure its long-term competitiveness, uphold its social market economy model and consolidate its global leadership in the new net-zero economy”. But, along the way, “the EU will need to address several challenges and make choices that will affect our societies and economies at an unprecedented pace and scale.” Among other things, it proposes “to adjust gross domestic product (GDP) to take account of different factors such as health and the environment.” So, several challenges await the European Union in its transition to sustainability in its double economic and social component. The following are mentioned as examples: evolving geopolitical shifts are shaping public opinion and how governments across the globe act, challenging international cooperation on global issues, such as climate change or the energy transition; the need for a new economic model, focused on the wellbeing of people and nature, decoupling economic growth from resource use and shifting to more sustainable production and consumption; growing demand for adequate skills for a sustainable future (“85% of EU firms today lack staff with the competences needed to navigate the green and digital transitions”); the sustainability transition requires unprecedented investments, “achieving which will depend on securing sufficient funding both from the public and private sectors”.Valentina Bombelli