EU leaders have agreed on a strategy to boost jobs and growth over the next ten years.

At a summit meeting in Brussels on 25-26 March, the leaders of the national governments approved targets for boosting employment, spending on research and development, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The targets are contained in the Europe 2020 strategy, which is meant to restore growth and competitiveness in the EU in the wake of the financial and economic crises.

But the leaders resisted calls by the European Commission to set targets for education and for cutting the number of people in poverty.

Speaking after the summit in Brussels, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the EU had “set an agenda for a smart, sustainable and green economy”.

He admitted that more work was needed on the education and poverty targets.

“By definition, everyone is against poverty,” Barroso said, adding that some countries had “concerns on competences”.

Barroso said that action to tackle poverty at EU-level was allowed under the Lisbon treaty. He said that progress had been made on the issue at the summit because the leaders had agreed unanimously that fighting poverty and social inclusion was a “shared objective”.

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CLIMATE TALKS

The government leaders promised to bring “a new dynamic” to international talks on climate change, spelling out their expectations for two big meetings in 2010.

Efforts to agree a new global deal on climate change will resume at a United Nations conference in Bonn in May-June, to be followed by a further UN conference in Cancún at the end of the year.

The EU wants the Bonn meeting to produce a roadmap for moving the talks forward, while Cancún is supposed to lead to agreements on key issues, such as adaptation to climate change and tackling deforestation. This position was reiterated by EU leaders today in their summit conclusions.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, promised contacts with “principal parties” to move the talks forward. The EU also wants climate change put on the G20 agenda.

Concerns about the EU’s readiness to persevere with its climate change strategy were awakened this morning, when a draft of the summit conclusions emerged that did not contain the EU’s standing promise to increase its carbon-reduction effort to 30% by 2020 if other countries made similar efforts. The target was later restored, as some governments argued that it would look inconsistent not to include the EU’s oft-stated position.

The European Commission will in June present EU leaders with a cost-benefit analysis of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. 

“If the conditions are right we want to go to 30% and we are committed to 30%,” said Gordon Brown, the UK’s prime minister, after today’s meeting. Extending the target to 30% “depends on other countries being as ambitious as we are and that depends on us being able to get this international agreement”.

Van Rompuy said the EU was “going to try and develop a whole new negotiating dynamic over the months to come”.

Much of the conclusions re-stated earlier promises, although Spain successfully inserted a commitment to reverse biodiversity loss.

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Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, who chaired the summit, said that a poverty target was “part and parcel of the European model”, but that there were statistical problems in agreeing a common definition of poverty.

The Commission had proposed cutting the number of people living in poverty by 20 million by 2020, and cutting the number of early school-leavers to under 10% and ensuring that 40% of young people have a university degree or diploma.

Germany has been one of the countries most opposed to the education targets, saying that education is the responsibility of regional governments.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said that the five targets proposed in the Commission’s draft were of “varying quality”. She said “more discussion” was needed on the education target but that she expected the EU to agree targets in June.

EU countries are expected to set national targets based on the EU-level objectives at a summit meeting in June.

“Our goal is to have not only overall targets but national targets consistent with European targets,” Barroso said.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, said that he was very happy with the conclusions on Europe 2020, but all countries had to take responsibility for implementing it. “These are clear objectives, concrete objectives that help us aim to meet the challenges that the whole of the European Union is facing,” he said.

The leaders also agreed to refer to agriculture as making an “important contribution” to the growth strategy. This was at the request of countries including Ireland, Romania and Hungary.

Brian Cowen, Ireland’s prime minister, said the food and drink industry was one of Europe’s biggest. “You don’t remain silent about an industry that is your biggest manufacturing sector in Europe at the moment,” he said.

The Europe 2020 strategy is a successor to the Lisbon Agenda, agreed in 2000, which aimed to make the EU “the most competitive economy in the world,” by 2010.

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