I am glad this week’s theme is called ‘sustainability’ and not ‘the environment’. The ‘environment’ always sounds like something you look at out of the window, or visit at the weekend. However what is on the agenda now is much more than that, it is about whether we can sustain the capacity of the planet to keep economic activity going at the sorts of levels which can provide a good quality of life.

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), the most thorough investigation yet of the state of the planet, found that most ecosystems are in serious deterioration. This has been backed up by numerous other scientific studies. This is not only about climate change, the problem is much more wide-ranging than that. Nor is it simply a matter of predictions about the future – the ecological crisis is already here.

And now we have the spread of Western-style consumer society in countries like China and India. If the planet cannot cope with the pressures it already has, there is zero chance that it can cope with those pressures if they come not just from North America and Europe but from across large parts of Asia and elsewhere in the developing world.

All this requires a rethink of many aspects of how we live, what sorts of technologies we have, how cities are organised, what energy sources we use, what our food supply and transport systems look like, and so on.

Is the EU up to playing its part in this task? It has driven much of the environmental legislation now in operation in member states, for example on energy efficiency, waste, and habitat protection. It tried to play a leading role in the Copenhagen talks, not entirely successfully but apparently sincerely. So there is some drive there to take the necessary action. However, as usual, ‘environment’ gets separated from ‘economy’, and when we look at economic strategy, the picture is depressingly ‘business as usual’.

The EU is now debating what to put in the next 10-year strategy, ‘Agenda 2020’, which will replace the failed Lisbon Agenda. This new strategy is due to be signed and sealed by heads of government a year from now. Some of the early documents have included words which imply some improvement on the Lisbon Agenda, but the dominant view amongst governments appears to be not that the objectives of economic policy need to be changed, but that they must simply try harder.

Some are seeing (I base this on an article in the London Financial Times 4th March) what needs to be done as getting ‘a more forceful strategy to ensure … implementation’ to press ahead with the Lisbon Agenda approach of prioritising economic growth and the single market.

How this would be achieved is not clear. However, more importantly, this would be to miss the opportunity which the drawing up of ‘Agenda 2020’ presents. Would it be possible to develop a green/social democratic alternative to the existing documents, to move the EU on to a different path for economic policy, in line with its best instincts on environmental issues?

The bureaucratic nature of the EU as it stands is largely the result of citizens not making use of the mechanisms of democratic accountability which already exist for EU institutions (though of course these should be developed further). We should be contacting MEPs, members of parliament, and government representatives, pressing them in the course of this year to ensure that the new strategy for Europe becomes one which matches up to the scale of the crisis the world’s ecosystems are now in.

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