The European Union has been labelled as leader in environmental policy and a pioneer on sustainability measures for a long time. Despite criticisms and shortcomings, it can be argued that the EU has contributed to ramp up environmental protection efforts and the embeddedness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement in the latest policy initiatives signify a greater level of policy priority given to these matters compared to that in the not so distant past. This panel is the last contribution of the Research Network on ‘the Role of Europe in global challenges: climate change and sustainable development’ in its current format to the UACES annual conference. The papers reflect on the level of integration of environmental and sustainability policy efforts between the national and the EU levels, the need for whole system (integrative) approaches to address sustainability related problems, the understanding of concepts, and the challenges that current events such as the war in Ukraine pose to the sustainability path that the EU has chosen with the aim to become the first climate neutral continent by 2050.

In the past, two concepts have been developed by the authors which try to analyse European sustainability policies.

First, the European environmental conscience (Hoerber, 2013) was proposed as an explanation why European integration was progressing fast in the sector of sustainable development. It was characterised by a concentration of expertise on the EU level. Rightly so, because the problem of environmental degradation was no respecter of frontiers and thus too big for any Member State to solve by itself. And consequently, all European peoples want this problem solved, because all felt the consequences of environmental degradation.

Secondly, Ego-ecology (Hoerber, Kurze, Kuenzer, 2021) outlined the nationalist perversions of an environmental conscience, but also the potential that such national or local environmental motivations could open nationalist logic towards the necessity to finding solution on a larger scale, i.e. the EU.

This article takes both rationales further and asks the question whether environmental protection pays for anyone if the others continue polluting. Based on present and historical examples, e.g. the London and the Beijing smock, the author posits that there may be an intermediate size of territory between localities and the world (mezzo level) at which environmental protection produces immediate benefits. Where this mezzo level lies would have to be determined in collaboration with climate scientists. For this paper, we will simply develop the thesis.

Over the last decade developments in coupling energy and climate change policy at the EU level have pushed integration dynamics further than ever. The recent war in Ukraine prompted the EU to seek to ‘diversify our supply, accelerate the roll out of green energy technologies and reduce our demand of energy’(REPower EU, 2022:2).

However, some of the New Member States, such as Romania, have chosen to ‘stay still’ and pursue policy priorities in the energy sector that were more suitable to the early 1990s, focusing on gas and nuclear as the main areas of growth (Buzogany and Davidescu, 2022), despite some early success in the development of renewable energy (Davidescu, 2018). This goes counter the objectives of the European Green Deal of delivering a ‘modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy’ (EC, 2022). This paper is trying to explain this policy continuity looking at the discourse on energy security and gas, particularly in the context of Romania’s support for gas to be labelled as a transition fuel that would qualify for EU funding as ‘green’ investment, while also adopting an anti-Russian attitude in energy policy (Ćetković & Buzogány, 2019). The paper looks at the tensions and contradictions between recent legislation in support of offshore exploitation in Romania. While an earlier Legislative Proposal (648/220) to support offshore wind has ended in failure after two years of debate, the Law 157/2022 supporting the exploitation of offshore gas and oil has been fast-tracked and adopted in haste with broad political support.

Using legislative process tracing and discourse analysis, this paper puts forward the argument that domestic policy-makers have used a narrow and conservative framing of the energy security discourse as maintaining the same energy mix. Any future plans have been focused on increasing existing capacity and deepening the lock-in effect of fossil fuel infrastructure, while also moving against the tide of EU’s energy and climate policy priorities and sustainability agenda.

The Farm to Fork Strategy, one of the flagship initiatives of the European Green Deal, aims to accelerate the transition of our food system to a sustainable one. This would involve, among other characteristics, to ensure that everyone has ‘access to sufficient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food’. However the problem of food poverty and food affordability has been largely absent from the EU level of policy and high level discourses have denied up until recently that food poverty is an issue in Europe. It is under the umbrella of ‘food security’ that some measures that could contribute to reduce the problem have been taken, but it is still seen as something left to the national and regional levels of policy. This paper argues that there is room for food poverty to be addressed at the EU level, and the crisis created by the Covid19 pandemic first, and the war in Ukraine more recently, with the interruption of global food supply chains, opens a window of opportunity to take a more integrated approach to food related policies. This may involve further reforms to the ever-changing (but never enough) Common Agricultural Policy, but also a deeper reflection of what it is understood as a sustainable food system.