The European Green Deal sets a high ambition for a toxic-free environment leading to zero pollution. The Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) adopted on 14 October 2020 outlines the Commission’s strategy for the sustainable and safe use of chemicals.
Current legislation requires N2 vehicles to be equipped with speed‑limitation devices, a rule originally designed for heavy‑duty vehicles to ensure road safety and environmental protection. Electric vans, however, often fall into the N2 category solely due to their battery weight. The exemption aims to align electric vans with their fossil‑fuel equivalents and support the transition to cleaner transport.
The proposal simplifies and streamlines EU technical rules and testing procedures for motor vehicles to reduce regulatory burdens and costs for the automotive industry, while maintaining safety and environmental standards.
The Commission proposal is a key element of the Savings and Investments Union agenda. The EESC considers the Commission proposal a step in the good direction, and stresses that more ambition is needed. In particular, to remove remaining duplicative reporting obligations, maintain a level-playing field, increase transparency of systematic internalisers, create a category of 'covered cross-border bonds', and to ensure that supervision leads to identical outcomes all across the EU.
The Cyprus Presidency has asked the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) to draw up an exploratory opinion aimed at analysing how affordable housing initiatives can integrate measures to reduce energy costs for families and support vulnerable households.
The new European Grids Package seeks to strengthen and modernise the EU’s energy infrastructure, ensuring secure, affordable and increasingly clean energy flows across Member States. It introduces a more coordinated planning framework, accelerates permitting, and enhances investment to support a fully interconnected and future-proof European energy system.
The opinion analyses the legislative proposal on the EU Business Wallet which aims at enabling secure digital identification, data sharing and legally valid notifications across the EU. Its purpose is to help economic operators manage regulatory requirements, cut administrative burdens and compliance costs. By ensuring interoperability with national systems, it also aims at supporting cross-border business, boosting SME competitiveness, fostering trust in digital interactions and advancing the EU’s digital single market.
The opinion examines the digital omnibus, a set of two legislative proposals which focuses on bringing regulatory simplification and immediate relief to businesses active on digital.
This opinion addressed the Commission's legislative initiative which aims to reduce the administrative burden without affecting the environmental objectives agreed under the existing legislation in the areas of, among others, industrial installations and circular economy, environmental assessments and permitting, chemical waste, Extended Producer Responsibility and waste management.
The EESC welcomes the 2025 Strategic Foresight Report: Resilience 2.0, while underlining that future reports should also address radical disruptions. The EESC is uniquely placed to detect weak signals and underlying trends in strategic foresight and therefore its foresight-driven viewpoint should continuously feed into the Commission’s policy cycle. The EESC also calls for common, verifiable EU-wide metrics for socio-economic and institutional resilience. In this regard, the EESC is of the view that strategic foresight should also support sustainable and inclusive well-being as part of the European social model.
