How can education contribute to the ecological transition? How can EU cooperation promote green and smart mobility, in line with the ambition of the European Green Deal? How can digital solutions contribute to smarter use of energy and resources? These questions and more are answered in new, short “Quick Tips” documents which provide concrete ideas and suggestions for EU staff in headquarters and delegations to green EU cooperation in key sectors.
The 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement call for a fundamental rethinking of development models. The European Union has long been committed to tackling climate and environment-related challenges and has made this a priority through the European Green Deal.
As the EU gears up to support partner countries through external assistance in the next programming period (2021-2027) and with ongoing support for the implementation of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) has designed a series of ‘Quick tips’ publications to actively promote effective and ambitious climate and environmental integration across a number of key sectors.
Every sector has the potential to contribute to several Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously. Such contributions also help deliver action on targets related to climate change adaptation and mitigation, to curbing pollution, to improving public health, to conserving ecosystems and biodiversity and to addressing land degradation. The Green Deal embraces this approach and seeks to rally all stakeholders around a shared responsibility and ensure that we all do our part. Moreover, in fighting today’s challenges, such as, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU is convinced that going green is the way to ensure sustainable recovery and build back better.
Along these lines, the ‘Quick tips’ provide practical ideas and suggestions to colleagues from the European Commission headquarters, the EU Delegations and partner country institutions to promote green development and address environmental and climate-related issues in key sectors: sustainable energy, transport and mobility, education, infrastructure, food and agriculture, private sector development and trade, and digitalisation.‘Quick tips’ on activities that qualify for Rio markers
Each ‘Quick tips’ publication also contains a note to help track the financial contributions of development cooperation actions towards the objectives of the United Nations Rio Conventions: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention to Combat Desertification; in line with the methodology adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
The EU committed to spend at least 20 % of its budget for 2014-2020 on climate related actions. As regards biodiversity, in 2012, the EU endorsed the Hyderabad objective to ‘double total biodiversity-related international financial resource flows to developing countries’ by 2015 and up to 2020 – against a baseline value of € 167 million per year. Thus far, the EU is on track, but more remains to be done in order to safeguard the future.
These commitments are expected to be stepped up under the forthcoming EU Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, which will set the ambitions for the 2021-2027 period.
Click on the link below to download all the ‘Quick tips’ publications and their associated documents on activities that qualify for Rio markers in the different sectors: