Intervention by Tony Long, Director of WWF EPO, at the conference organised by WWF Greece / Athens, 15 October 2014 

I start my intervention with a quotation from the then International President of WWF, Chief Anayaoku, at a major conference in Brussels in 2007:

“Our way of living is not only threatening the health and diversity of our planet’s species, but has become a huge threat to human survival as well.

·     Societies cannot continue to operate as if the planet was a business in liquidation.

·     We cannot continue to turn our backs on pollution and call it someone else’s problem.

·    We cannot continue to call income what in reality is resource depletion.

·  We cannot claim economic success for development patterns that leave hundreds of millions of people marginalised and which stoke the fears of resentment and conflict.

We need to move beyond conventional economic accounting. We are calling for new ways to measure and record progress so that we can take the necessary corrective measures to set a more wise development path.” 

Following the European Parliament elections in all 28 Member States at the end of May, European leaders have received a strong signal from Europe’s voting public. One view is that traditional parties have seemingly been punished for their austerity policies of the past five years, and Eurosceptic, far-left and right parties have advanced. Circumstances vary too much between countries to be able to build up one composite picture that is true for everyone. So perhaps the more interesting question now is will we see Europe heading out on a different path?

It is clear that the EU elections are reshaping much of Brussels’ political landscape. The cards have been re-shuffled. We know for certain that in a Parliament of 751 members, there will be around 100 deeply Eurosceptic MEPs. How far they will be able to have an influence on actual decision making is much less certain at this time. There is no great reputation for political cohesiveness or even real political identity in this rag tag group.