Achieving sustainability is possible. The adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 and the Paris Agreement in the same year created a new impetus for the debate on how to do so. With an emerging recognition of the serious risks of continuing with unsustainability, there is currently unprecedented support for change. This is reflected in the new EU Commission now towards the end of 2019, with its emphasis on an EU Green New Deal and a Just Transition. The transition to sustainability also has strong legal basis in the EU’s overarching goals set out in its Treaties, with duties to protect the environment, human rights and human dignity, within the EU and in the EU’s relations with the wider world.

To achieve sustainability, we need to change the way business operates. The SMART project supports the transition to sustainability through a set of reform proposals aiming to change the way business and finance operate, and the way products are produced and consumed. We aim to make it possible and easy for business and finance to create value in a sustainable manner, and for products to be produced and consumed in a way that contributes to securing a safe and just space for humanity within planetary boundaries. As such, our reform proposals concern the EU as a global actor, and the EU as a legislator and policymaker.

We invite comments and suggestions to our reform proposals, as presented both in this introductory report and in response to the detailed proposals that we will make available on our SMART website in the final months towards the project’s conclusion in February 2020.