The European Union’s environmental policy must now be seen as a key part of Europe’s defense strategy, said Jessika Roswall, European Commissioner for the Environment, on the resilience of water and a competitive circular economy.
ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING
She stressed that many of the bloc’s environmental concerns, including the effects of climate change, pose an existential threat to Europe and its security.
“There are many examples. [Par exemple] water, which is not only a resource. We need water for our daily lives, for energy production, for food production. And when the water runs out, we are in difficulty and, in the long term, this also represents a threat to our security,” declared the commissioner in the Euronews interview program. The Europe Conversation.
“Globally, we also know that water fuels conflict and other tensions,” Roswall said.
However, she stressed that natural resources can also be used as strategic tools. Poland, Finland and Lithuania, for example, are studying the restoration and replenishment of dried peatlands along their eastern borders, as part of a dual-objective strategy: fighting climate change and strengthening national defense.
The idea is that swampy terrain physically hinders the progress of heavy military equipment like tanks.
“We see how we can transform wetlands into border barriers and make it more difficult […] the passage of an invasion,” she said. In Lithuania, the Ministries of Defense and the Environment are joining forces on this issue.
“But the main concern is that biodiversity erosion, crop failures, floods and droughts all pose a threat to security. HAS”
Instabilité géopolitique
This threat was highlighted by a recent report published by the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), to which the intelligence and security services MI5 and MI6 are said to have contributed.
“It concluded that nature degradation poses the greatest threat to the UK’s national security. The effects, of course, are the same for many other countries,” Roswall said.
The report’s authors warned that without “major intervention,” threats from biodiversity erosion risk causing geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased competition for resources.
“We must understand that not investing in nature involves an economic risk, but also a risk for our security. And that’s why, in my opinion, we don’t have a choice about whether or not we invest in our future: we have to do it. HAS”
The report also expressed concerns about the UK’s dependence on global markets for its food and fertilizer.
The bloc’s own dependence on fertilizers from outside Europe was highlighted by the US-Iran conflict and the resulting Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane for global agricultural supply chains.
As a result, European farmers are now facing a significant rise in fertilizer prices.
“This shows once again that dependence has a cost,” Roswall said, adding that Europe also depends on countries outside the EU for its energy and critical raw materials.
In this context, she believes that the law on the circular economy, supported by the commissioner, will be decisive for the strategic autonomy of Brussels.
“It’s not just Europe that needs these critical raw materials. The race for these materials is getting tougher. We therefore need to be more self-sufficient, and circularity plays a crucial role in using the materials we have in Europe more efficiently. We are actually a gold mine [de matières premières]but we do not exploit it. HAS”
Change mentalities
The law on the circular economy, whose presentation is scheduled for the end of 2026, aims to increase the share of materials recovered from waste to be reused and to reduce the proportion of virgin materials (raw, intact resources, extracted directly from nature) imported, for example for the manufacture of new electrical and electronic equipment.
To achieve this objective, the bloc wants to create a single market for secondary raw materials – recycled materials, recovered from waste or end-of-life products.
“We must demonstrate the economic interest of secondary materials, because today virgin materials are cheaper than secondary materials, but they are also rare and instrumentalized,” Roswall explained.
“We therefore need to get rid of this dependence and, for this, consumers, policy makers and businesses must change their mindset. HAS”
