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The aim of this own-initiative opinion is to develop a strategy to achieve a sustainable plant protein and plant oil open autonomy in the EU by analysing the potential of EU-grown plants. It will also discuss the potential of pure plant oil as a sustainable source for running heavy tractors and other agriculture and forestry machines in a sustainable energy system.
EESC believes that there is a need to have a clear and structured view of which funds are targeted to tackle climate change and how they are managed. With an approved budget of over EUR 330 billion in the current programming period, cohesion policy is the largest and most important investment tool in Europe. As 30% of both the Cohesion Fund and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) will need to be spent on projects for decarbonising our economy, cohesion policy has a crucial role in tackling climate change. Moreover, funds will also be made available under NGEU, as the green transition is one of the main targets of recovery and resilience after COVID-19.
The Commission's Legislative proposal on substantiating green claims will cover claims made on any of the environmental impacts covered by the Environmental Footprint methods and on claims on overall environmental performance. Environmental claims are any explicit environmental information on products / services or companies, including labels/ logos and text, in whichever form it is provided (e.g. website, brochure, on shelf, television, radio etc.).
Today it is indeed difficult for consumers, companies and other market actors to make sense of the many environmental labels and initiatives on the environmental performance of products and companies. There are more than 200 environmental labels active in the EU, and more than 450 active worldwide. Some of these methods and initiatives are reliable, some not; they are variable in the issues they cover.
Semiconductor chips are the essential building blocks of digital and digitised products. From smartphones and cars, through critical applications and infrastructures for healthcare, energy, mobility, communications and industrial automation, chips are central to the modern digital economy. They determine performance characteristics of digital systems, among them security and energy-efficiency – essential to the EU’s digital and green transitions. They are also crucial to key digital technologies of the future, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and edge computing, as set out in the EU’s 2030 Digital Decade. Put simply, there is no “digital” without chips.