Starting from the need that the sustainability debate lacks momentum and strategy, the European network of Friends of the Earth has started a process that will revive the concept of a sustainable Europe and bring it back onto the agenda of the groups of Friends of the Earth.

A meeting of several people from Friends of the Earth and the Sustainable Europe Research Institute was recently held in Vienna to identify key issues of the transatlantic dialogue. One of those will be the debate about ecological debts that refer to the unpaid costs of depleting natural resources in southern countries by northern economics and the damages the northern behaviour causes in the south. There is the idea of using these ecological debts to compensate for financial debts of those countries, and as it was seen that to quantify the ecological debts is a very hard task, the approach will serve for a lot of discussion during the pathfinder process and be highly interesting also for the SERI.

The meeting also discussed the problem of how to newly communicate the ideas of the Sustainable Europe Study since the basics are still widely valid and we potentially just need a new packaging. Over the next three months, a concept will be developed how the discussion can be done effectively in the network of Friends of the Earth, and this concept not only includes the content related subjects of sustainability but in particular develops methods and tools for the facilitation of the discussion itself. As a first step, it will be investigated how such a low-hierarchy system like FoE can develop common positions in general and serve as capacity building tool for itself. Then special implications of the key issues of a sustainability debate will be examined in how far the contents influence the methods of the debate, and in a later stage different tools and a facilitation concept will be developed.
The debate will have its heart on a comprehensive web site that will also serve as a sustainability database for the SERI.

The network-wide debate itself will start in autumn with a transatlantic workshop where representatives from Latin American groups and institutions that are involved in the sustainable Latin America process and European FoE groups. The SERI works as a scientific backup for the preparation of the process and gives advice and makes the scientific data available.

The minutes of the meeting are available.

Between 1994 and 1997 the network of Friends of the Earth Europe had a very successful campaign on a sustainable Europe. A study made by the Wuppertal Institute outlined the key targets for reaching a society living in its environmental space.

The Sustainability Website will provide information on the basic principles for a sustainable Europe, such as environmental space, equity principle, resource use reduction etc. and pprovide links to important organisations and documents dealing with sustainability.

The project is sponsored by the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Friends of the Earth Europe and SERI.

SERI provides scientific support for the website.

You can have a look at the site here.