The Challenges on the Path Toward Sustainability in the EU

These lines are written in the time of the worldwide lockdowns, implemented to stem the spread of the new coronavirus. While shutting off a large portion of the economy is most likely driving the economy into a completely unexpected and in modern history unprecedented crisis, the shutdown of the economy also clearly revealed the strong anthropogenic element in environmental pollution. Data and satellite images, for example, show significantly reduced environmental pollution, resulting from reduced power plant activities, decreased use of fossil fuels in production, transport and other uses. However, the upsides could be only temporal manifestations of how natural environment could be preserved, with many persistent manifestations of global environmental crises, including climate change, a global water crisis and biodiversity loss, still present. World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (Ripple et al., 2017) reawakened the debate on the importance of addressing the environmental crisis, stressing that humans are jeopardizing our future by economy rooted in growth, intense material consumption, increasing greenhouse gases emissions, population growth and lack of pollution curbing, ecosystems’ restoration and lack of incentivizing renewable energy. In addition to environmental degradation, society and business are confronted with increasing social inequity and poverty. In this regard, this book deals with a timely and relevant subject.