On April 19th the second meeting of the European Environmental Convention (EEC) took place in Paris, France. They announced something almost incredible: it has succeeded to stop the worsening of the environmental pollution – at least in Europe.
The European Environmental Convention (EEC) was founded in 2020 at a meeting in Berlin, Germany. One environmental representative from every country in Europe congregated to arrange common goals to improve the environment and to stop the worsening of environmental pollution. One main reason why the EEC was founded was, because of the breach of condition of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty of industrialized countries with the goal of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Until the beginning of December, 2011, 193 countries and the European Union ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The USA never joined the protocol and Canada resigned from it on December 13th, 2011. Originally, the representatives wanted to extend the Kyoto Protocol until 2020, but also other countries resigned from the protocol and as a result of that they cancelled the protocol in June, 2018.
The European Environmental Convention had a number of major goals: Firstly, to produce and sell only electric driven cars until 2025, so that there will not be any fuel driven cars in a while. They wanted to lower the prices of electric driven cars as well, so that they will be affordable for everyone. Secondly, another big goal was to enlarge the system of public transportation and bicycle paths and thirdly, to prohibit smoking in restaurants or other public indoor buildings to prevent pollution in the streets. Especially the smoking ban was hard to enforce, because the cigarette companies were afraid of lower earnings and went on strikes at first. But after some time this prohibition additionally led to an improvement of health of the people and fewer humans fell sick with lung cancer. Another important goal was to inform people about how important it is to save our world. The EEC did that with the aid of a lot of advertisements and information meetings, because we only have one world and it´s worth saving it. Furthermore, the EEC raised the economic taxes, especially for the use of electricity and the waste of water and they introduced the CO2 – tax for energy – intensive branches. But then they lowered the prices for solar energy plants to make it also affordable for people with little incomes to buy it for their houses.
All these measures led to results which were better, or at least the same as in 2020. Especially the CO2 – emissions could be lowered to almost half of the emissions that Europe had 10 years before. `These are wonderful results that show us that we can change so much only because of the use of electric driven cars. `, said Inga Kukullis, a Latvian ecologist. In addition, the air quality in bigger cities was improved a lot. For these reasons it is much healthier to live in cities than it was only a few years ago. Ivan Petrov Nikolov, a man from Sofia, Bulgaria told a news reporter: ´I had to go to the countryside to a rehab center for at least four times a year to treat my lung disease, because in my home city the air pollution was very bad. Now, after all the measures by the EEC to help the environment, my pain in the lungs has almost gone. `
Additionally, the EEC was able to tell an indirect result of all these measures relating to floods. In the past there were fatal floods in 2002, in 2013 and again only 6 years later in 2019, especially in Germany and Austria alongside the river Danube. `Currently there is no proof that this is related to our measures, but we are optimists and believe that in the near future there won´t be those terrible floods again`, Lucy Berkeley, a flood hazard expert from Great Britain pointed out.
One thing that didn´t change in the last decade was the temperature. There were still very hard, hot and arid summers and rather cold and long winters. `We can´t change the climate within a few years. This is a slow process that takes a while`, said Stefano Mazzini, a climate expert from Italy.
On April 19th the EEC determined another big goal. They want to further improve the environmental pollution in Europe and convince other countries from all over the world to do something for their planet.
The goals of the EEC worked out, due to the fact that all European countries worked together and if the whole world worked together, it would be possible to do almost everything to change the present environmental situation.
Paulina Lewitsch