Two days ahead of the meeting of European leaders on a coordinated response to the Covid-19 crisis, the European Commission set out a number of actions needed to step up the fight against the pandemic.

The Commission has called on member states to accelerate the roll-out of vaccination across the EU: by March 2021, at least 80% of people over the age of 80, and 80% of health and social care professionals in every Member State should be vaccinated. And by summer 2021, member states should have vaccinated a minimum of 70% of the adult population.

The Commission also called on member states to continue to apply physical distancing, limit social contacts, fight disinformation, coordinate travel restrictions, ramp up testing, and increase contact tracing and genome sequencing to face up to the risk from new variants of the virus. As recent weeks have seen an upward trend in case numbers, more needs to be done to support healthcare systems and to address “Covid-fatigue” in the coming months.

Key actions for member states, the Commission, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) which will help reduce risks and keep the virus under control:

Speeding up the roll-out of vaccination across the EU

•    By March 2021, at least 80% of people over the age of 80, and 80% of health and social care professionals in every Member State, should be vaccinated.
•    By summer 2021, Member States should have vaccinated 70% of the entire adult population.
•    The Commission, Member States and the EMA will work with companies to use the EU’s potential for increased vaccine manufacturing capacity to the fullest.
•    The Commission is working with Member States on vaccination certificates, in full compliance with EU data protection law, which can support the continuity of care. A common approach is to be agreed by the end of January 2021 to allow Member States’ certificates to be rapidly useable in health systems across the EU and beyond.

Testing and genome sequencing

•    Member States should update their testing strategies to account for new variants and expand the use of rapid antigen tests.
•    Member States should urgently increase genome sequencing to at least 5% and preferably 10% of positive test results. At present, many Member States are testing under 1% of samples, which is not enough to identify the progression of the variants or detect any new ones.

Preserving the Single Market and free movement while stepping up mitigation measures

•    Measures should be applied to further reduce the risk of transmission linked to the means of travel, such as hygiene and distancing measures in vehicles and terminuses.
•    All non-essential travel should be strongly discouraged until the epidemiological situation has considerably improved.
•    Proportionate travel restrictions, including testing of travellers, should be maintained for those travelling from areas with a higher incidence of variants of concern.

Ensuring European leadership and international solidarity

•    To ensure early access to vaccines, the Commission is to set up a Team Europe mechanism to structure the provision of vaccines shared by Member States with partner countries. This should allow for sharing with partner countries access to some of the 2.3 billion doses secured through the EU’s Vaccines Strategy, paying special attention to the Western Balkans, our Eastern and Southern neighbourhood and Africa.
•    The European Commission and Member States should continue supporting COVAX, including through early access to vaccines. Team Europe has already mobilised €853 million in support of COVAX, making the EU one of COVAX’s biggest donors.

President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “Vaccination is essential to get out of this crisis. We have already secured enough vaccines for the entire population of the European Union. Now we need to accelerate the delivery and speed up vaccination. Our aim is to have 70% of our adult population vaccinated by summer.

“That could be a turning point in our fight against this virus. However, we will only end this pandemic when everyone in the world has access to vaccines. We will step up our efforts to help secure vaccines for our neighbours and partners worldwide.” – TradeArabia News Service

Jobs and investment are likely to continue to leave the City of London for the European Union due to Brexit, Ireland’s EU commissioner Mairead McGuinness said as she launched a plan to strengthen the bloc’s financial system.

                                                    <p class="no_name">“There has been this discussion around movement of employment and investment. Already some has happened and it is likely that more will follow,” Ms McGuinness said.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">“While that is happening, it isn’t our objective that we’re trying to take some of the one million people’s jobs that are in the <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_location=United+Kingdom" rel="nofollow">United Kingdom</a>. But we are trying to take account of Brexit,” she added.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">The <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_organisation=European+Commission" rel="nofollow">European Commission</a> has not yet made a series of equivalence decisions on British financial services, which would ease access for UK banks and financial firms to the single market by effectively deeming British regulations to be on par with those of the EU.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">Ms McGuinness, who is in charge of financial markets and services, said that the commission was still lacking clarity on the British government’s intentions regarding regulation, and on how much it will seek to diverge from its past alignment with the bloc.</p>
                                                                                                                                                                                        <h4 class="crosshead">Equivalence</h4><p class="no_name">The commission would only grant equivalence where it is in the EU’s strategic interest, she added.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">It comes after the biggest political group in the EU called for a strategy to encourage crucial sectors of the financial industry to relocate into the bloc.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">“We need a clear step-by-step masterplan that helps key financial sector businesses move from the United Kingdom to the European Union,” said MEP <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Markus+Ferber" rel="nofollow">Markus Ferber</a>, who is finance spokesman for the right-wing European People’s Party, which includes <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_organisation=Fine+Gael" rel="nofollow">Fine Gael</a> in its grouping.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">This week, mayor of London <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Sadiq+Khan" rel="nofollow">Sadiq Khan</a> wrote in the Financial Times that the City of London had been “sidelined” in the Brexit talks and that Britain’s trade deal with the EU was “effectively a no-deal Brexit for finance”.</p>

                                                    <p class="no_name">A new strategy unveiled by Ms McGuinness on Tuesday aims to reduce the bloc’s dependence on financial services outside its jurisdiction.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">The plan seeks to develop greater capacity within the EU in financial market infrastructure and to bolster the international role of the euro as a currency.</p>
                                                    <p class="no_name">This is important to “shield our economy and financial system from foreign exchange shocks, reduce reliance on other currencies and ensure lower transaction, hedging and financing costs for EU firms,” commissioner for the economy <a class="search" href="/topics/topics-7.1213540?article=true&tag_person=Paolo+Gentiloni" rel="nofollow">Paolo Gentiloni</a> said.</p>

Renewable energy growth has reduced greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution and delivered a range of other co-benefits since 2005, according to a new briefing document released by the European Union’s (EU) European Environment Agency (EEA) on Monday.

Renewables, which include biomass in this report, have risen to 34% of all electricity generation, doubling since 2005, but fossil fuels still produce the largest share, at 38% of total generation in 2019. One quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the electricity sector in the EU.

The briefing cites a detailed life-cycle analysis of renewable energy conducted by the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), published in late December 2020.

The research compares the impacts of renewable energy, both positive and negative, to a counterfactual scenario in which no new renewables were built. Emissions, air pollution, acidification and eutrophication (in which bodies of water become excessively oxygenated, damaging ecosystems) were all improved by renewable energy growth.

The outcomes for freshwater eco-toxicity were a net decrease, because “solar PV has a relatively high impact intensity for ecotoxicity because of the emissions of metal, related to mining and smelting operations, and chlorine from the purification of solar-grade silicon,” however some of thsse impacts were offset by wind.

Land impacts were greater due to renewable use, but the vast majority of this had come from the high usage of biomass in the EU. The bulk of emissions reductions from the use of renewables came from onshore wind power, follower by rooftop and utility scale solar, and then by biomass.

The growth of renewable energy resulted in avoiding the use of 145 mega-tonnes of oil equivalent of fossil fuels 2018; roughly equivalent to the gross final energy consumption of France. Of this amount, 39% was solid fuels and 31% was gaseous fuels. Similarly, the emissions avoided due to the growth of renewables in the EU was roughly equivalent to the total GHG emissions of France, for the year of 2018.

The full report finds that offshore and onshore wind, and solar PV energy avoided 30, 161 and 79 megatonnes of CO2, respectively, and 270 in total for the year 2019. This compares to 38 MTCO2 from biogas and 33 MTCO2 from solid biomass, for renewable electricity.

For the EU’s climate pledges to be met, renewable energy must grow to nearly 70% of all EU generation by 2030 and to more than 80% by 2050, which in turn allows other sectors to reduce emissions through electrification, such as road transport.

The EU proposes several pathways for reducing the impacts of this growth in renewable energy, such as prioritising better end of life material recovery for solar PV. Among renewable technologies, PV has a relatively high emissions impact in the manufacturing process, and as such, the EU proposes increases the proportion of clean electricity used in PV manufacturing to bring down this emissions intensity.

Demand-side management, such as energy and resource efficiency, circular business models and lifetime extensions for non-combustible power sources can all help, as can improved effort to site and design large-scale renewable projects to better suit local and broader ecosystem needs.