All German parties should make climate 'central pillar' of election programmes – govt advisors

German government advisors have launched an urgent call on the country's political parties to make climate action a central topic in their programmes for next year's general elections. The Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) said the legislative period following the elections in autumn 2021 "offers the last realistic opportunity to set the course for achieving the sustainability goals for 2030 and the climate goals for 2030 and 2050”. The panel said it "wants to encourage all political parties to develop an integrated environmental and sustainability policy as a central pillar of their election programmes”.

The SRU is an expert advisory panel focusing on environmental protection consisting of seven members, all of them university professors from a range of disciplines. The SRU's mandate is to independently advise the German Federal Government on environmental policy issues.

"In the upcoming election campaign, a competition is needed to find the best ideas and concepts for the major environmental and sustainability policy challenges," the SRU said. "On the one hand, there is a need for future proposals for key sectors such as mobility and agriculture. On the other hand, in the view of the SRU, structural levers should be activated for sustainable politics, economy and society. This includes better institutional and legal anchoring of environmental policy concerns, but also the mobilisation of capital to finance the necessary change processes." The forthcoming legislative period 2021 to 2025 is of "unprecedented importance for German environmental and sustainability policy”, the SRU says in an impulse paper, which argues that legally binding targets, green finance, new participatory instruments, a deepening dialogue between politics and science, as well as systematic coalitions on a European level should be central building blocks for the next government's environmental policy.