Memo to the commissioner responsible for environment policy

Memo

Memo to the commissioner responsible for environment policy

Publishing date: 04 September 2024
Authors: Heather Grabbe

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The link between economic sustainability and the environment should be obvious, but in practice environmental policy continues to face pushback because of short-term economic concerns, and failure to account for the longer-term costs of environmental degradation. You will have to plan for this pushback in promoting policy in crucial areas including safeguarding biodiversity, water security, resource efficiency and pollution reduction. Your best strategy may be to create stronger links between the environment and the EU’s major policy goals – especially economic security and competitiveness – and to show how environmental policies are enablers of other policies. Improving environmental metrics will be important to make the case.

Key actions:

Propose a green economic security strategy
Develop detailed sustainable competitiveness policies
Foster long-term thinking, especially on agriculture

Read the full memo by clicking the download button at the top of this page.

About the authors

Heather Grabbe

Heather Grabbe is a Senior fellow at Bruegel, as well as visiting professor at University College London and KU Leuven. The focus of her research is the political economy of the European Green Deal and how the climate transition will change the EU’s international relationships and external policies.

She is a political scientist who has served as director of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, and earlier as deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. She conducted academic research at the European University Institute, Chatham House, Oxford and Birmingham universities, as well as teaching at the London School of Economics. From 2004 to 2009 Heather was senior advisor to then European Commissioner Olli Rehn, responsible in his Cabinet for policy on the Balkans and Turkey. She has written extensively on the political economy of EU enlargement, the EU’s external and neighbourhood policies, and the evolution of new policy agendas in climate, digital and the rule of law. Her columns appear in the Financial Times, Politico and other quality media.

Heather earned her PhD at Birmingham University, and her first degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, where she also had a post-doctoral fellowship. She is fluent in English, French and Italian, with working level German.