Key diary dates

• Monday 24 March – Agriculture and Fisheries Council.

• Monday 24 – Tuesday 25 March – Informal meeting of health ministers in Warsaw to discuss mental health and medicine security issues.

• Thursday 27 March – Ministers will focus on the environmental dimension of the clean industrial deal during an Environment Council in Brussels.

In spotlight

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Against the backdrop of a tit-for-tat trade dispute and US withdrawal from global climate and environmental negotiations, European environment ministers are due to convene in Brussels this week for their first EU Council summit since the changing of the guard in Washington turned global diplomacy on its head.

It will also see the first discussion at ministerial level and in public of key parts of the EU’s new industrial strategy, so should offer important signals about the extent to which the agenda of the Green Deal that marked president Ursula von der Leyen first commission will survive the deregulatory – or ‘simplifying’ – zeal of her second.

“Not deregulation, because the word is taboo at the moment, but this is bottom line what it means: less constraint, less declaration, less licensing, less disclosure,” European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde observed last week in an interview with the BBC.

On the agenda on 27 March is a debate on the Clean Industrial Deal, a plan to merge decarbonisation and a kind of European industrial renaissance under one policy umbrella – which was presented on 26 February alongside the first of a promised series of simplification packages.

The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), which represents an extensive network of green groups in Brussels, wrote to environment ministers a week ahead of the summit, applauding the Commission’s apparent determination to “stay the course” on climate action amid the bonfire of red tape.

But the umbrella group slammed the Commission’s clean industrial deal plan for “disregarding” the commitments to achieve zero-pollution and a toxic-free environment that were at the core of the green deal.

With ministers also slated to discuss global environmental policy in a Trump II world, the EEB urged governments to recommit to multilateralism and take ambitious positions as global talks on climate, plastics and biodiversity grind on.

Ukrainian Minister for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Svitlana Grynchuk, will brief EU ministers on the environmental impacts of the Russian aggression against Ukraine – a topic she covered in an exclusive interview with Euronews at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November.

“Unfortunately, some ecosystems will be lost forever and will not be possible to restore,” Grynchuk said at the time. “But we will try to protect and to restore what we can.”

Many will be asking the same of the EU’s own environment ministers.

Policy newsmakers

Mediterranean frenemies

The EU Council summit saw two politicians on opposite sides of the political spectrum united in an unlikely marriage of convenience. Both Spanish socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Italian right-wing premier Giorgia Meloni criticised the name ‘Rearm Europe’ given to Ursula von der Leyen’s blueprint to mobilise up to €800 billion for defence over the next four years during last week’s EU Council summit. “I don’t like the term ‘rearm’,” Sánchez made clear several times during the summit, doubling down on his request to include expenses related to counter-terrorism, the fight against climate change and other issues in the framework of security investments. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had previously voiced similar reservations. Asked later if she was willing to rebrand her €800-billion blueprint, the president of the European Commission said the concept had “grown or matured to Readiness 2030”, a term already deployed this week in the EU White Paper on Defence. 

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