CBI Pro-Akademia

Natural resources underpin our economy and our quality of life. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso stated, „Continuing our current patterns of resource use is not an option. Increasing resource efficiency is key … It will bring major economic opportunities, improve productivity, drive down costs and boost competitiveness“. Evidence on our past performance indicates that the EU's response must go beyond existing policy action. In particular, the achievement of the EU's environmental policy goals depends on greater resource efficiency (RE). Consequently one of the 7 Flagship Initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy is dedicated to RE (COM/2011/571). It is complemented by a EU Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe (COM/2011/021), which provides the strategic framework for future action and calls for an integrated approach across many policy areas at European, transnational and national levels. It defines resource productivity (measured by the ratio of GDP to Domestic Material Consumption) as the lead indicator for RE. The EU12 (and most CE countries belong to the NMS) have a dramatically lower productivity than the EU15 or the EU27 average (581 compared to 1304 USD/ton). And the trend is even more alarming: While the material productivity in the EU15 has been increased constantly since 2000, the productivity in the EU12 has remained static or even decreased! This calls for immediate action in CE. Thus it will be crucial for enterprises in CE to increase their resource productivity in order to keep or even increase their competitiveness. By doing so they could reduce at the same time their dependence on imports of increasingly scarce materials, minerals and fuels in order to be better prepared to cope with rising and volatile energy and commodity prices. Eco-innovations are a prerequisite for SMEs to do so. Two major barriers for exploiting the potential for RE in products and production processes can be identified:

• Enterprises and especially SMEs are not aware of their resource utilization, real costs of pollution and the related (cost) reduction potential as well as means to improve RE.
• SMEs have problems in financing necessary investments in eco-innovations in order to exploit their potential to increase RE. PRESOURCE aims at increasing RE in SMEs in the production sector in CE by promoting transnational incentives for ecoinnovations.

PRESOURCE aims at increasing RE in SMEs in the production sector in CE by promoting transnational incentives for ecoinnovations. This objective is built on the achievement of the following results:

• Improved in-house capacity (managerial and technological)
• Improved knowledge and mechanisms for risk sharing and for financing eco-innovations in SMEs
• Improved framework conditions