Security, Competitiveness and Sovereignty:  Why Sufficiency Matters for the EU

Europe is at a crossroads. In the face of growing geopolitical upheaval, the European Commission has launched a series of flagship initiatives to strengthen the EU’s economy. Among them, the Clean Industrial Deal marks an important step forward — aiming to boost the competitiveness of European industries while accelerating their decarbonisation. Central to this approach are energy security, affordability, and circularity, which are essential to managing limited resources and reducing the EU’s overdependence on third countries. 

Sufficiency policies, as a complement to efficiency solutions, are crucial to increase Europe’s resilience and autonomy, cut costs for households and businesses, and achieve climate and sustainability objectives, by strategically reducing resource use. A reduction in volume is necessary for the EU to achieve the targeted proportions of electrification and circularity in a cost-effective and independent way.

This is why, ACR+ joined forces with other civil society organisations to call on the European Commission and the Parliament to integrate sufficiency across all relevant sectoral policy initiatives and legislations currently under discussion at EU level. In a new policy brief, we propose 10 actions and targets, embedded in current sectoral policy initiatives and legislation, to reduce energy and resource consumption for a more competitive and secure European economy. ACR+'s main contribution focused on public procurement.

To implement sufficiency in different EU legislative proposals currently discussed and help make the EU more resilient, we call on the EU Commission and the EU Parliament to set:

1. Binding resource use targets to reduce the EU’s material footprint
2. Binding EU 2040 energy consumption reduction targets
3. Obligation to monitor the use of existing buildings in Europe
4. Taxation and allocated investment to address vacant and under-used buildings and encouraging reuse/repurpose
5. Mandatory water impact assessments in all new EU industrial policies
6. Water reuse promotion across sectors
7. EU target for citizen-owned energy by 2050, including 2030 and 2040 interim targets
8. European scheme to achieve low-carbon modal shift, affordable access to quality public transport and resource-efficient vehicle design
9. Make the use of price-quality criteria in public procurement mandatory.
10. Establish mandatory sectoral Green Public Procurement criteria and targets