I’m sure you’ve already noticed: There is an international competition to regulate artificial intelligence. The participants are governments or international organizations. The goal is to create rules that make the risks of this technology manageable. The prize is to profit from the opportunities it can bring. So far, so good.
No one disputes that we need good rules. Every country has the right to set itself such rules – and the best way is to agree on them at the international level. At least with the countries that share our values.
But one may well ask whether it makes sense for the G7, the G10, the OECD and Unesco, the Council of Europe and the European Union to work in parallel on their own AI regulations or guidelines. The UK also wants to get involved with its own initiative, as a mediator between all fronts.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has issued an invitation to the two-day “First Global AI Safety Summit” at Bletchley Park in southern England next week. Sunak said yesterday that he was convinced that only governments could get a grip on the risks of artificial intelligence. He said he hoped participants could agree to set up an international body to do so. For its part, the UK wants to set up its own artificial intelligence security institute to “study, evaluate and test new types of AI so we understand what each new model is capable of”.
We hope AI entrepreneurs, policymakers, and experts at Bletchley Park – where British codebreakers once worked during World War II – come up with compelling solutions.
Two wars, many positions and a long dispute: At Thursday’s summit in Brussels, the EU’s 27 heads of state and government reached the limits of their common foreign policy. While they were largely united on the Ukraine war, the debate on the war in Israel and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza was marked by disagreement. The debate dragged on until late in the evening; summit head Charles Michel had to amend his draft several times.
In Ukraine policy, the 27 rely on continuity. As expected, the summit reaffirmed political, financial, and military support for the country invaded by Russia. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that Europe is “on Ukraine’s side”. Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda called for not forgetting the war in Eastern Europe: “My message today is to continue to support Ukraine, even if we have other trouble spots and geopolitical reasons.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was connected via video conference, called on the EU to give the green light for accession negotiations soon. Ukraine has “practically implemented” the seven conditions set by the EU Commission, Selenskyj said. Kyiv does not want any exceptions to the agreed rules, he said. He appealed to the EU not to be distracted by the war in the Middle East. The enemies of freedom” wanted to open a “second front”; this had to be fought off together, he said.
Hungary’s head of government Viktor Orbán caused irritation. After being criticized for a handshake with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in China, he boasted about his connection to the Kremlin. Hungary, he said, was the only EU country advocating peace between Russia and Ukraine. “We are proud of that.” Luxembourg’s outgoing Prime Minister Xavier Bettel disagreed: “Towards a country that suffers every day from Russian missiles, this is a real stinker”, he said.
However, the dispute over Middle East policy and the European position on Israel and Gaza cost the most time and nerves. Germany and Austria tried to keep Israel’s back in the war against Hamas and to fend off demands for a longer ceasefire. Hungary and the Czech Republic also stressed Israel’s right to self-defense, while Spain, Ireland and Belgium spoke out in favor of a cease-fire to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
“Now it is a matter of showing that we support Israel”, said Chancellor Olaf Scholz upon his arrival in Brussels. He said it was important for the EU to take a “clear stand”. More aid for the Palestinians, on the other hand, was urged by Spanish head of government and current EU Council President Pedro Sánchez. “I am definitely in favor of a humanitarian pause”, he said. This, he said, was the minimum. In fact, a cease-fire was needed, to be followed by a peace summit and a two-state solution.
Council President Michel tried to please both sides. However, he initially approached Germany in particular, bringing into play vague formulations such as “humanitarian corridors” and “pauses”. After opposition from Spain and Ireland, the draft was supplemented with passages on the protection of civilians and the demand for “rapid, safe and unhindered” access for humanitarian workers in Gaza. Nevertheless, the controversial debate dragged on until dinner.
After that, an agreement was reached after all. First and foremost, the summit condemned Hamas’s terrorist attack and emphasized Israel’s right to defend itself – “in accordance with international law”. The EU then expressed “grave concern” about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. Those in need must be helped “by all necessary means, including humanitarian corridors and ceasefires for humanitarian purposes”, it said. The European Union will work closely with partners in the region to protect civilians, provide assistance, and facilitate access to food, water, medical supplies, fuel, and shelter, the statement added. In doing so, it said it wants to ensure that this aid is not misused by terrorist organizations.
The result largely corresponds to Germany’s wishes, which were, however, supplemented by sharp formulations on the humanitarian situation of the Palestinians. The conclusions do not contain any concrete mandates for action. Whether the formulaic compromise will help to forget the image of disunity and weakness of recent weeks remains to be seen. The test is likely to come soon – when Israel launches its ground offensive in Gaza.
He was very satisfied that a Parliament position on the Commission’s CSA proposal had been agreed, rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos (EPP) said at a press conference with the shadow rapporteurs. “We have tried to find a comprehensive approach to the fight against sexual abuse online.” He said the parliamentary position contains the right balance between effective combating and respect for fundamental rights, and between prevention, containment, and detection.
Children must be consistently protected from sexualized violence, Parliament Vice President Katarina Barley (SPD) stressed to Table.Media. “There are many effective measures to prosecute and prevent these offenses. Reading end-to-end encrypted messages, that’s not one of them.”
In fact, although a different cover was used for it, one can almost speak of a counterproposal to the Commission’s draft. In the controversial Article 49, the all-faction proposal focuses much less on technological measures to detect potential new misrepresentations. Instead, it focuses more on the deletion of already known material on the basis of so-called hash values and indicators, which are to be stored in a central database at the planned “Center for Child Protection”, as Parliament proposes to call it. Only software that complies with the specifications may be used for the search – the center is to have its own detection software developed and then make it available to providers.
“What is on the table is a slap in the face for the Commission“, formulates left-wing politician Cornelia Ernst. “It has to be said so clearly, because the Commission didn’t really focus on the protection of children, but on mass surveillance.” That the Commission’s proposal is not the right way to go, the deputies seem to agree after intensive debates. Everything that is mass surveillance is not only a no-go for Parliament, formulates rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos. It is a no-go for the European Union. No one wants to cross this line, which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has drawn.
For example, any form of client-side scanning, a technique for circumventing effective end-to-end encryption, was deleted. The parliamentary text states: “Nothing in this regulation shall be construed as prohibiting, weakening, or undermining end-to-end encryption.” The Parliamentarians thus clearly rejected any weakening of encryption algorithms, for example through backdoors.
Instead of more surveillance, they are counting on a significant strengthening of practical victim protection – starting with the operators of offers. “The winners of this agreement are the children”, says Patrick Breyer, a Member of Parliament for the Pirate Party, shadow rapporteur for the Greens and a judge before his mandate. The problematic parts were removed in the parliamentary position, he said. Instead, measures were included that protect rights – for example, the rule that social media profiles of minors must be set to private as a default setting.
The Parliamentarians do not want to let operators off the hook in other areas either. All providers would have to examine the risk and take the necessary steps. The parliamentary position provides for a restriction to hosting services and publicly accessible content of number-independent interpersonal communications services. There is also an exception for offerings that do not present a substantial problem.
Only those providers who refused to comply could be issued with a testing order by a court – they would then have to check for already known depictions of sexual abuse themselves. Grooming, the initiation of relationships with children, is explicitly excluded from such orders in the Parliament’s vision, and text messages would not be subject to the intended court orders. In three years, the Commission is to present a report here on the effectiveness on grooming.
MEPs today pointed the finger in the direction of the Council, whose deliberations of the dossier are currently stuck. The Parliament has come forward and formulated the bar. Much to Barley’s delight: “In my view, the EU Commission’s draft regulation would not be compatible with the case law of the European Court of Justice. The ECJ prohibits snooping without any reason in people’s private chats and putting the population under general suspicion. We need preventive measures and must ensure more resources for effective law enforcement. The Council should recognize this in its current negotiations.”
Seven VLOPs have submitted their first transparency reports under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Zalando, and Bing were quicker than required. The reports vary widely in form and content. Amazon’s transparency report, for example, is 26 pages long and, including photos, almost looks like a marketing brochure. Bing has presented its information in fold-out chunks. Zalando has kept it short with eight pages. Snapchat offers a page with links that were dead when the editors tested them.
The Commission intends to standardize the reports more and more over time. For the format and content specifications, however, the “Digital Services Committee” must first be formed with the authorities of the member states. They can therefore be decided in February 2024 at the earliest.
The deadline for the total of 19 VLOPs and VLOSEs (Very Large Online Search Providers) named on April 25 is Nov. 6. The remaining designated companies therefore still have some time.
The transparency reports are intended to provide clarity and reliability in the moderation of content, thus protecting users from illegal content and facilitating control. VLOPs and VLOSEs will have to submit this report every six months from now on.
Platforms with less than 45 million users and intermediary services will also have to publish annual transparency reports once the DSA also applies to them, meaning from February 2024. These regular transparency reports have nothing to do with the investigations the Commission is conducting into some companies on the occasion of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
In the transparency reports, companies must provide information on how they moderate content on their platforms. For example, they must report how many users (and trusted flaggers, if any) they have, how much content they have removed on their own initiative or by order of authorities. They must report what the error rate is for their automated content control systems. The reports must also include information about the moderation teams, including their qualifications and language skills.
Amazon, which has filed a lawsuit against its designation as a VLOP, lists in detail how often the platform was contacted by regulators: In the first half of 2023, there were 1,081 contacts from authorities in EU member states. On average, it took less than a day to notify an authority that a complaint had been received – and two days to resolve the issue, it said. Most complaints (754) came from Germany.
During the same period, Amazon claims to have taken content moderation actions on its own initiative 274 million times to remove content from the EU store – as well as actions related to policy violations or illegal content. Amazon apparently relies primarily on automated systems to moderate content. Amazon does not provide figures on how many employees the company employs in content moderation in the EU and which languages they speak.
TikTok’s report is visually less lavish than Amazon’s, but it also comprises 23 pages. According to the report, TikTok removed almost four million pieces of content in September 2023 alone and also categorized them from youth protection to violence and horror. TikTok “estimates” to have more than 6,125 moderators dealing with content in the EU. In addition to Gaelic and Maltese, TikTok covers another 22 EU languages. With 869 German-speaking moderators, the German-speaking region is disproportionately well covered. Countries such as Estonia or Lithuania, which are heavily exposed to malicious Russian propaganda, are weakly staffed with six moderators each who speak the language.
Zalando, which like Amazon is defending itself legally against the classification as a VLOP, has also made this clear once again in its report. Zalando checks very carefully which content it uploads. By way of illustration, Zalando states a clear zero for the number of deleted content.
The climate crisis is accompanied by another crisis that has received little political attention so far: the water crisis. Yesterday, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) became the first European institution to present plans to tackle it. In parallel, a coalition of European NGOs published a position paper calling for a new EU law on climate and water resilience.
In doing so, they are spreading the Call for a Blue Deal which was initiated last September by MEP Pernille Weiss (EPP) and Pietro de Lotto, coordinator for a European Blue Deal at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). This call is supported by 35 EU Parliamentarians from all parties.
EESC President Oliver Röpke yesterday presented a political declaration with a set of 15 guiding principles and 21 concrete actions for a Blue Deal. “Water is THE priority“, Röpke said. “We need to learn from the mistakes made on climate and energy issues, and critical raw materials and adopt a stand-alone water strategy on an equal footing with the EU Green Deal.”
Even if the “Blue Deal” is the subject of the satirical TV series “Parliament” – the consequences of the water shortage are still measured in euros. In a just-published report, WWF estimates the annual economic value of water and freshwater ecosystems in the European Union at more than €11 trillion. “That’s about 2.5 times the GDP of Germany”, explains Claire Baffert, water policy officer at WWF’s European Policy Office, which co-signed the position paper.
In it, the NGOs note that direct economic benefits, such as water use for households, irrigated agriculture, and industry, amount to at least nearly a trillion euros a year in Europe. It also estimates that the invisible benefits – which include water purification, improved soil health, carbon storage, and protection of communities from floods and extreme droughts – are ten times as high, at about ten trillion euros per year.
Lack of rain, less water in rivers, falling levels in most groundwater resources: Available renewable water in Europe is declining, the report summarizes. This is due to the effects of global warming, but also to rising water demand, especially in agriculture and industry.
Mais voilà: Damage to rivers, lakes, wetlands, and groundwater “threatens” these values and “undermines” EU climate and nature action and progress toward Water Framework Directive goals, Claire Baffert continued. And already, the Nature Restoration Act is upon us again, with the next political trilogue scheduled for Nov. 7. “Because the solutions can’t just be technical, we need solutions based on nature”, says the water expert.
However, France relies mainly on technical solutions in its “water plan” presented in March this year. Paris has had to respond because repeated droughts have led to sometimes violent disputes between farmers and other water users (including swimming pool owners and golfers who like to play their favorite sport on a sparkling lush green).
Reducing water use is the “only solution” in the face of climate change, Antoine Pellion, secretary general for ecological planning, stressed at a hearing by deputies of the Assemblée Nationale’s sustainable development committee.
In Brussels, too, the topic of water has just made its political way onto the Commission’s agenda: Among the three initiatives in the new work program presented last week is one dedicated to water resilience. None of these initiatives is of a legislative nature, however, which is unsurprising: a proposal for a directive or a regulation would have no chance of being adopted before the European elections in June 2024.
I’m sure you’ve already noticed: There is an international competition to regulate artificial intelligence. The participants are governments or international organizations. The goal is to create rules that make the risks of this technology manageable. The prize is to profit from the opportunities it can bring. So far, so good.
No one disputes that we need good rules. Every country has the right to set itself such rules – and the best way is to agree on them at the international level. At least with the countries that share our values.
But one may well ask whether it makes sense for the G7, the G10, the OECD and Unesco, the Council of Europe and the European Union to work in parallel on their own AI regulations or guidelines. The UK also wants to get involved with its own initiative, as a mediator between all fronts.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has issued an invitation to the two-day “First Global AI Safety Summit” at Bletchley Park in southern England next week. Sunak said yesterday that he was convinced that only governments could get a grip on the risks of artificial intelligence. He said he hoped participants could agree to set up an international body to do so. For its part, the UK wants to set up its own artificial intelligence security institute to “study, evaluate and test new types of AI so we understand what each new model is capable of”.
We hope AI entrepreneurs, policymakers, and experts at Bletchley Park – where British codebreakers once worked during World War II – come up with compelling solutions.
Two wars, many positions and a long dispute: At Thursday’s summit in Brussels, the EU’s 27 heads of state and government reached the limits of their common foreign policy. While they were largely united on the Ukraine war, the debate on the war in Israel and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza was marked by disagreement. The debate dragged on until late in the evening; summit head Charles Michel had to amend his draft several times.
In Ukraine policy, the 27 rely on continuity. As expected, the summit reaffirmed political, financial, and military support for the country invaded by Russia. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stressed that Europe is “on Ukraine’s side”. Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda called for not forgetting the war in Eastern Europe: “My message today is to continue to support Ukraine, even if we have other trouble spots and geopolitical reasons.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was connected via video conference, called on the EU to give the green light for accession negotiations soon. Ukraine has “practically implemented” the seven conditions set by the EU Commission, Selenskyj said. Kyiv does not want any exceptions to the agreed rules, he said. He appealed to the EU not to be distracted by the war in the Middle East. The enemies of freedom” wanted to open a “second front”; this had to be fought off together, he said.
Hungary’s head of government Viktor Orbán caused irritation. After being criticized for a handshake with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin in China, he boasted about his connection to the Kremlin. Hungary, he said, was the only EU country advocating peace between Russia and Ukraine. “We are proud of that.” Luxembourg’s outgoing Prime Minister Xavier Bettel disagreed: “Towards a country that suffers every day from Russian missiles, this is a real stinker”, he said.
However, the dispute over Middle East policy and the European position on Israel and Gaza cost the most time and nerves. Germany and Austria tried to keep Israel’s back in the war against Hamas and to fend off demands for a longer ceasefire. Hungary and the Czech Republic also stressed Israel’s right to self-defense, while Spain, Ireland and Belgium spoke out in favor of a cease-fire to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
“Now it is a matter of showing that we support Israel”, said Chancellor Olaf Scholz upon his arrival in Brussels. He said it was important for the EU to take a “clear stand”. More aid for the Palestinians, on the other hand, was urged by Spanish head of government and current EU Council President Pedro Sánchez. “I am definitely in favor of a humanitarian pause”, he said. This, he said, was the minimum. In fact, a cease-fire was needed, to be followed by a peace summit and a two-state solution.
Council President Michel tried to please both sides. However, he initially approached Germany in particular, bringing into play vague formulations such as “humanitarian corridors” and “pauses”. After opposition from Spain and Ireland, the draft was supplemented with passages on the protection of civilians and the demand for “rapid, safe and unhindered” access for humanitarian workers in Gaza. Nevertheless, the controversial debate dragged on until dinner.
After that, an agreement was reached after all. First and foremost, the summit condemned Hamas’s terrorist attack and emphasized Israel’s right to defend itself – “in accordance with international law”. The EU then expressed “grave concern” about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. Those in need must be helped “by all necessary means, including humanitarian corridors and ceasefires for humanitarian purposes”, it said. The European Union will work closely with partners in the region to protect civilians, provide assistance, and facilitate access to food, water, medical supplies, fuel, and shelter, the statement added. In doing so, it said it wants to ensure that this aid is not misused by terrorist organizations.
The result largely corresponds to Germany’s wishes, which were, however, supplemented by sharp formulations on the humanitarian situation of the Palestinians. The conclusions do not contain any concrete mandates for action. Whether the formulaic compromise will help to forget the image of disunity and weakness of recent weeks remains to be seen. The test is likely to come soon – when Israel launches its ground offensive in Gaza.
He was very satisfied that a Parliament position on the Commission’s CSA proposal had been agreed, rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos (EPP) said at a press conference with the shadow rapporteurs. “We have tried to find a comprehensive approach to the fight against sexual abuse online.” He said the parliamentary position contains the right balance between effective combating and respect for fundamental rights, and between prevention, containment, and detection.
Children must be consistently protected from sexualized violence, Parliament Vice President Katarina Barley (SPD) stressed to Table.Media. “There are many effective measures to prosecute and prevent these offenses. Reading end-to-end encrypted messages, that’s not one of them.”
In fact, although a different cover was used for it, one can almost speak of a counterproposal to the Commission’s draft. In the controversial Article 49, the all-faction proposal focuses much less on technological measures to detect potential new misrepresentations. Instead, it focuses more on the deletion of already known material on the basis of so-called hash values and indicators, which are to be stored in a central database at the planned “Center for Child Protection”, as Parliament proposes to call it. Only software that complies with the specifications may be used for the search – the center is to have its own detection software developed and then make it available to providers.
“What is on the table is a slap in the face for the Commission“, formulates left-wing politician Cornelia Ernst. “It has to be said so clearly, because the Commission didn’t really focus on the protection of children, but on mass surveillance.” That the Commission’s proposal is not the right way to go, the deputies seem to agree after intensive debates. Everything that is mass surveillance is not only a no-go for Parliament, formulates rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos. It is a no-go for the European Union. No one wants to cross this line, which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has drawn.
For example, any form of client-side scanning, a technique for circumventing effective end-to-end encryption, was deleted. The parliamentary text states: “Nothing in this regulation shall be construed as prohibiting, weakening, or undermining end-to-end encryption.” The Parliamentarians thus clearly rejected any weakening of encryption algorithms, for example through backdoors.
Instead of more surveillance, they are counting on a significant strengthening of practical victim protection – starting with the operators of offers. “The winners of this agreement are the children”, says Patrick Breyer, a Member of Parliament for the Pirate Party, shadow rapporteur for the Greens and a judge before his mandate. The problematic parts were removed in the parliamentary position, he said. Instead, measures were included that protect rights – for example, the rule that social media profiles of minors must be set to private as a default setting.
The Parliamentarians do not want to let operators off the hook in other areas either. All providers would have to examine the risk and take the necessary steps. The parliamentary position provides for a restriction to hosting services and publicly accessible content of number-independent interpersonal communications services. There is also an exception for offerings that do not present a substantial problem.
Only those providers who refused to comply could be issued with a testing order by a court – they would then have to check for already known depictions of sexual abuse themselves. Grooming, the initiation of relationships with children, is explicitly excluded from such orders in the Parliament’s vision, and text messages would not be subject to the intended court orders. In three years, the Commission is to present a report here on the effectiveness on grooming.
MEPs today pointed the finger in the direction of the Council, whose deliberations of the dossier are currently stuck. The Parliament has come forward and formulated the bar. Much to Barley’s delight: “In my view, the EU Commission’s draft regulation would not be compatible with the case law of the European Court of Justice. The ECJ prohibits snooping without any reason in people’s private chats and putting the population under general suspicion. We need preventive measures and must ensure more resources for effective law enforcement. The Council should recognize this in its current negotiations.”
Seven VLOPs have submitted their first transparency reports under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Zalando, and Bing were quicker than required. The reports vary widely in form and content. Amazon’s transparency report, for example, is 26 pages long and, including photos, almost looks like a marketing brochure. Bing has presented its information in fold-out chunks. Zalando has kept it short with eight pages. Snapchat offers a page with links that were dead when the editors tested them.
The Commission intends to standardize the reports more and more over time. For the format and content specifications, however, the “Digital Services Committee” must first be formed with the authorities of the member states. They can therefore be decided in February 2024 at the earliest.
The deadline for the total of 19 VLOPs and VLOSEs (Very Large Online Search Providers) named on April 25 is Nov. 6. The remaining designated companies therefore still have some time.
The transparency reports are intended to provide clarity and reliability in the moderation of content, thus protecting users from illegal content and facilitating control. VLOPs and VLOSEs will have to submit this report every six months from now on.
Platforms with less than 45 million users and intermediary services will also have to publish annual transparency reports once the DSA also applies to them, meaning from February 2024. These regular transparency reports have nothing to do with the investigations the Commission is conducting into some companies on the occasion of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
In the transparency reports, companies must provide information on how they moderate content on their platforms. For example, they must report how many users (and trusted flaggers, if any) they have, how much content they have removed on their own initiative or by order of authorities. They must report what the error rate is for their automated content control systems. The reports must also include information about the moderation teams, including their qualifications and language skills.
Amazon, which has filed a lawsuit against its designation as a VLOP, lists in detail how often the platform was contacted by regulators: In the first half of 2023, there were 1,081 contacts from authorities in EU member states. On average, it took less than a day to notify an authority that a complaint had been received – and two days to resolve the issue, it said. Most complaints (754) came from Germany.
During the same period, Amazon claims to have taken content moderation actions on its own initiative 274 million times to remove content from the EU store – as well as actions related to policy violations or illegal content. Amazon apparently relies primarily on automated systems to moderate content. Amazon does not provide figures on how many employees the company employs in content moderation in the EU and which languages they speak.
TikTok’s report is visually less lavish than Amazon’s, but it also comprises 23 pages. According to the report, TikTok removed almost four million pieces of content in September 2023 alone and also categorized them from youth protection to violence and horror. TikTok “estimates” to have more than 6,125 moderators dealing with content in the EU. In addition to Gaelic and Maltese, TikTok covers another 22 EU languages. With 869 German-speaking moderators, the German-speaking region is disproportionately well covered. Countries such as Estonia or Lithuania, which are heavily exposed to malicious Russian propaganda, are weakly staffed with six moderators each who speak the language.
Zalando, which like Amazon is defending itself legally against the classification as a VLOP, has also made this clear once again in its report. Zalando checks very carefully which content it uploads. By way of illustration, Zalando states a clear zero for the number of deleted content.
The climate crisis is accompanied by another crisis that has received little political attention so far: the water crisis. Yesterday, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) became the first European institution to present plans to tackle it. In parallel, a coalition of European NGOs published a position paper calling for a new EU law on climate and water resilience.
In doing so, they are spreading the Call for a Blue Deal which was initiated last September by MEP Pernille Weiss (EPP) and Pietro de Lotto, coordinator for a European Blue Deal at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). This call is supported by 35 EU Parliamentarians from all parties.
EESC President Oliver Röpke yesterday presented a political declaration with a set of 15 guiding principles and 21 concrete actions for a Blue Deal. “Water is THE priority“, Röpke said. “We need to learn from the mistakes made on climate and energy issues, and critical raw materials and adopt a stand-alone water strategy on an equal footing with the EU Green Deal.”
Even if the “Blue Deal” is the subject of the satirical TV series “Parliament” – the consequences of the water shortage are still measured in euros. In a just-published report, WWF estimates the annual economic value of water and freshwater ecosystems in the European Union at more than €11 trillion. “That’s about 2.5 times the GDP of Germany”, explains Claire Baffert, water policy officer at WWF’s European Policy Office, which co-signed the position paper.
In it, the NGOs note that direct economic benefits, such as water use for households, irrigated agriculture, and industry, amount to at least nearly a trillion euros a year in Europe. It also estimates that the invisible benefits – which include water purification, improved soil health, carbon storage, and protection of communities from floods and extreme droughts – are ten times as high, at about ten trillion euros per year.
Lack of rain, less water in rivers, falling levels in most groundwater resources: Available renewable water in Europe is declining, the report summarizes. This is due to the effects of global warming, but also to rising water demand, especially in agriculture and industry.
Mais voilà: Damage to rivers, lakes, wetlands, and groundwater “threatens” these values and “undermines” EU climate and nature action and progress toward Water Framework Directive goals, Claire Baffert continued. And already, the Nature Restoration Act is upon us again, with the next political trilogue scheduled for Nov. 7. “Because the solutions can’t just be technical, we need solutions based on nature”, says the water expert.
However, France relies mainly on technical solutions in its “water plan” presented in March this year. Paris has had to respond because repeated droughts have led to sometimes violent disputes between farmers and other water users (including swimming pool owners and golfers who like to play their favorite sport on a sparkling lush green).
Reducing water use is the “only solution” in the face of climate change, Antoine Pellion, secretary general for ecological planning, stressed at a hearing by deputies of the Assemblée Nationale’s sustainable development committee.
In Brussels, too, the topic of water has just made its political way onto the Commission’s agenda: Among the three initiatives in the new work program presented last week is one dedicated to water resilience. None of these initiatives is of a legislative nature, however, which is unsurprising: a proposal for a directive or a regulation would have no chance of being adopted before the European elections in June 2024.
