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94 | Gábor Szabó and Szabolcs Diósi and steering projects, reports, and various strategic initiatives. Its leading role is also reflected in Article 3.3 of the Treaty on European Union, stating that the EU "shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the guality of the environment. The first extended, long-term European action plan that involved important sustainable development elements was the Lisbon Strategy adopted in March 2000. In its ten-year-interval (2000-2010), it aimed to set the strategic goal to make Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. In the end, the Strategy failed to deliver its central promise: during the ten-year period, the EU did not become a more competitive economy in the global market. However, it is important to note that sustainable development-related goals were seen as some of its genuine successes. One year later, in June 2001, at the Gothenburg European Council meeting, the Union adopted its first sustainable development strategy (A Sustainable Europe for a Better World) based on a Commission Communication. This was an ambitious long-term vision that had grown out of the broader global Rio process. The strategy dealt in an integrated way with economic, social, and environmental issues aiming to achieve economic growth, greater social cohesion, and a better environment. It was composed of two main parts. The first proposed objectives and policy measures’ to tackle a number of key unsustainable trends,’ while the second part called for a new approach to policymaking, which is able to secure the EU policies’ future success. It asserted that there was no time for further delay, urgent action was needed, and since the commitment towards sustainable development would provoke many conflicting interests, strong political leadership was essential. It also claimed that since too often in complicated EU policymaking processes actions made to achieve certain objectives in one policy area 5 It listed the following seven key policy areas: climate change and clean energy; sustainable transport; sustainable consumption and production; conservation and management of natural resources; public health; social inclusion, demography, and migration; and global poverty. 7 The six key unsustainable trends it established were: growing emission of greenhouse gases and climate change that is likely to cause more extreme weather events (e.g. hurricanes, floods, wildfires); severe threats to public health that are posed by resistant strains of some diseases; poverty and social exclusion that have immense direct effects on individuals, such as ill health, suicide, and persistent unemployment; gradual ageing of the European population that threatens a slowdown in the rate of economic growth, as well as the quality and financial sustainability of pension schemes and public health care; the loss of biodiversity in Europe that has accelerated dramatically in recent decades; persisting regional imbalances in the EU.
