About Climate Change and Wildlife Extinction

Talking to EU Representative Pierre Schellekens

By Sebastian Marx. Photo: EU Official

Biodiversity, human activity, global warming, the Paris agreement, climate change policies and targets from an EU perspective.

Mr Pierre Schellekens, how long have you been working for the European Commission?

“I’ve been working for the European Commission for 23 years now. I joined the first group of Swedes working for the EU in 1996 as a result of Swedish membership in 1995.”

What is your role in the European Commission?

“Today, I work as the deputy head of Cabinet of Commissioner Arias Cañete. He is the Commissioner for Energy and Climate Change. My role is to support the Commissioner in formulating the future EU climate policy.”

Talking about Climate Change, in a time where young people across the EU take to the streets strongly promoting firmer political action to fight climate change: How do you see this influencing the EU? Do you feel pushed to do more?

“Yes, I think we are listening to their messages. I always think it’s a positive thing when youngsters get involved into politics and this campaign has clearly put climate change higher onto the agenda again.

A lot has already been done and a lot is going on in regard to climate change. For example, we work to implement the Paris agreement and to concretise the EU’s commitment towards 2030 and we are working on a long-term policy towards 2050. But clearly the campaign that youngsters have sparked has given us an increased push and it has certainly increased the profile of the climate change issue.”

You mentioned the Paris agreement, the agreement within the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aiming to limit the threat of climate change on a global scale. How do you see this agreement now when we have big actors like the USA redrawing from the agreement? Do you think wecan live up to the agreement on a global scale?

“The important thing to say is, that the overwhelming majority of the international community remain committed to the Paris agreement. We have clearly seen that a push is continuing in Europe, but not only in Europe. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America we see a clear will to deliver on the Paris agreement. So I would still say, that there is a clear international commitment to the Paris agreement which provides a framework for how we are supposed to deal with climate change in the years to come. Now we have a debate about how we can try to make sure that the Paris agreement, which is the basis, is further strengthened in terms of ambition and in terms of meeting it’s fundamental objectives of avoiding climate change by keeping a global temperature rise during this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

Human impact on climate change is one important issue, but we also start to see big effects of human activities on various species. The United Nations just came up with a new report, which states that about 1 million species will be disappearing soon if we don’t do anything mainly due to deforestation and agriculture. How is this reflected on the European level?

“There are mainly two reasons for the challenges that we are seeing for our biodiversity, which is a fundamental challenge and very worrying tendency. One of them is of course direct human activity in terms of deforestation and agriculture. But the other one is climate change. By successfully addressing climate change we are also addressing the loss of biodiversity. We therefore focus on our work on climate change, but the EU also has its dedicated policies on biodiversity, where we define our targets. The strategy aims to halt the loss of biodiversity in the EU and help stop global biodiversity loss by 2020. We remain committed to these international efforts.”

Right now, you are also in the difficult process of negotiating a new budget for the EU and quite recently there was a new proposal supported by France, Sweden and some other member states to dedicate 25 percent of the EU budget to climate change action. How realistic do you think these proposals are and would this be enough to successfully tackle Climate Change?

“This proposal would mean that 1 Euro out of 4 of the EU budget is directly targeting climate change related measures. That’s quite a lot. Following our proposal for the next EU Budget this would mean around 320 billion Euros dedicated to Climate Change action in the years 2021-2027. Is it realistic? It is very realistic. Today we are nearly at 20 percent in the EU budget being dedicated to tackle climate change so raising it to 25 percent is absolutely realistic.

One thing to keep in mind is that addressing climate change is a cost at least in the short term but there are benefits in the long term and these benefits can well exceed the costs. But there is always this need of investing first. This being said, these investments are of an order of magnitude where they remain realistic from the European level. Keeping our current energy model would mean more or less continuing to spend 2 percent of GDP on our energy system. If we want to reach net zero emissions it will be more expensive, and we estimate that we would need to spend 2,8 percent of our GDP in our energy system. This is clearly a lot of money but it does remain within the boundaries of what is fully realistic. This doesn’t take into account many of the benefits that we will see for example in terms of reduced energy imports, where we today pay 266 billion euros in imports of gas and oil into the EU every year. Other benefits in terms of improved air quality and better quality of life, in terms of protected biodiversity, in terms of the fact that we also make our economies more efficient and productive by these measures, also needs to be taken into account.”

How do you think that organizations like The Perfect World Foundation play a role in creating change?

“When we want to create change there is always awareness-raising involved. It’s true that we currently focus on climate change, but it’s important also to talk about biodiversity and conservation of species and many other important environmental challenges. Organizations like The Perfect World Foundation play an important role in keeping and raising awareness on all these issues.

But it’s not only about raising awareness. It’s also about finding solutions. I mean, we can define policies at EU level but the concrete solutions to these issues, like the development of new technologies, generating investments and so forth, they will first and foremost be happening in the real world, outside the EU institutions.

The way we help is by creating a stable framework and a strong incentive through the regulations and funding programmes that we set up. But then it’s up to companies, researchers, civil society, national and local politicians and citizens to find these solutions. Climate change won’t be solved by the EU alone. Nor will it be solved only by civil society. It will be solved by working together on these issues.”

Finally, Pierre, we talked about the young people taking to the streets and we do have a lot of concerned citizens worrying about climate change. Are you optimistic about our future?

“I am and remain fundamentally optimistic. Although we sometimes take too much time, we do have the capacity to resolve the climate change issue. What I find very striking is that reaching a climate neutral world is already possible today by using the technologies we have available. Some of them still need to be deployed on big scale, but they do exist today. It’s more a question of political will. It’s not only about addressing climate change. It’s about changing our societies in a way that I find quite interesting and exciting. It’s about changing the way our cities work, about changing how we deliver and produce our energy and how we create a better quality of life for us all.

I’m also very optimistic about what’s happening in the private sector, what companies are innovating and investing in. They’ve really now adhered the message, accepted the science and when private sectors start to move, they move quickly. We should be careful to say that this is a kind of Canossa walk we take to punish ourselves for a greater good. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a clever policy, a policy that we should have carried out whether there is a climate change or not and a policy that simply will improve our quality of live. Of course we will solve this!”