EU Perspectives on Sustainable Development: Aligning the EU Budget to the UN SDGs by 2030

Abstract

AbstractMore than a year after the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) during the UN Summit in 2015, in which the European Union was a major driver of this process, the implementation of the UN SDGs progresses, however, rather slowly. The reflection paper on the Future of the EU Finances, issued in June 2017, does neither mention the UN SDGs in the foreword, nor insists on the necessity to implement them swiftly. More recent EU policy documents and draft papers of the so-called “EU multi-stakeholder process” voice a promising and more stringent alignment of EU policies with the SDGs. Particularly the finance sector and the EU budget could be leveraged to drive the European Union and the rest of the world towards the sustainable development path adopted in 2015. Fortunately, Mrs. Von der Leyen, new president of the Commission since December 2019, has asked each Commissioner to ensure the delivery of the UN SDGs within its policy area. It is therefore timely to reflect on how to deal with the EU budget in this context now, since the negotiations of the new EU Multiannual Financial Framework—post 2020 (MFF) are currently under negotiation. Out of the approximately EUR 1000 billion of the EU budget, we can assume that less than 40% is spent explicitly with the aim to achieve the UN SDGs. We therefore suggest a complete reorientation of the entire EU finances towards the implementation of the UN SDGs, or in other words, towards a more sustainable financial framework of the European Union in which financial support will only be granted when there is compliance with a given set of sustainability criteria, and when the activity can be connected to a given UN SDG. Some work and in-depth reflections in this sense are already being considered, both from relevant EU institutions and from other stakeholders, as will be shown below. Whereas latest news from the international finance sector discloses that the sustainable investment bond returns finally equal conventional ones, much more remains to be done to prompt the turnaround towards a sustainable economy. We will present recommendations on how this can be achieved. Most prominently, we advocate for an ambitious two step approach to align 70% of the EU Budget to the UN SDGs by 2025 and 100% by 2030.KeywordsSustainable financeEU budgetPlanetary boundariesUnited Nations development goalsUN SDGsSustainable developmentEuropean UnionEU multiannual financial frameworkEU MFF post 2020Future of EU financesEU common agricultural policyCAPEuropean action for sustainabilityEuropean action plan on sustainable financeThe Juncker PlanEU cohesion policy