Growth and resource efficiency

The use of natural resources has significant impacts on European economy as well as quality of life of its citizens while also having long-term effects on the global scale. The uptake of innovations and technologies put increasing pressure on the use of resources.

This set of over 20 national level policy briefs addresses the main objectives of the 2020 strategy by putting an emphasis on the Resource-efficient Europe Flagship initiative. Its focus is to help decouple economic growth from the use of resources, support the shift towards a low carbon economy, increase the use of renewable energy sources, modernize our transport sector and promote energy efficiency. Recommendations are drawn for each country.

You may access the set of national level policy briefs through this link.

The project “Public Participation in Developing a Common Framework for Assessment and Management of Sustainable Innovation” (CASI) is proposed as a response to one of the Grand Challenges set out in the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, namely “Climate action, environment resource efficiency and raw materials”.

It represents an EU-wide cross-sectoral partnership on innovation-related challenges and considers not only the impacts of social and technological innovation, but also the types of actors involved and their inherent interests. It thus effectively integrates the perspectives of civil society, SMEs, industry, policy stakeholders, and leading academics.

This collaboration investigates the scope of sustainable innovation as a societal phenomenon and enables the elaboration of an assessment framework of sustainable innovation practices, whose application can be successfully integrated into public policy developments.