The challenge of the European Green Deal – a dilemma for the future

The event participates in the “Europe Project of University Colleges of Merit 2025-2026.”

In the past two and a half centuries, from the beginning of the first industrial revolution to the present, humanity has had an enormous impact on the environment, exceeding many of those “ecological thresholds” that guarantee life. The world’s population has increased about tenfold, and with it energy consumption has increased 40 times and the production of goods has multiplied 160 times. This unprecedented growth now confronts us with the need to address an environmental crisis with potentially catastrophic effects within a few decades. In 2020, the European Union launched the European Green Deal with the goal of becoming a more environmentally sustainable continent while also integrating important social goals. However, the need to transform a system established over more than two centuries raises a dilemma: how can we protect the environment without harming the economy? Concerns regarding the impact of these policies on the economic competitiveness of some industries have already prompted the current European Commission to review many of the decisions it has taken in recent years. Lawyer Lorenzo E. Costa, specialized in environmental law, and Giovanni Sgaravatti, an economist and climate researcher, will talk about the achievements of the European Green Deal, its limitations and future prospects, outlining a legal-economic itinerary of European sustainability policies over the past five years.

Lorenzo E. Costa is a legal consultant working on the implementation of the European Green Deal at PwC Belgium and teaches Environmental Taxation and Sustainability at ICHEC in Brussels. Previously, he practiced as a lawyer specialized in environmental and industrial law at a major law firm in Spain, where he published several articles on European Union taxation.

Giovanni Sgaravatti works as an industrial transformation analyst at the think tank Agora Industry. Previously, Giovanni worked at the economic think tank Bruegel and at the UK’s National Statistical Office. His work on energy security and decarbonization has been published in leading academic journals and quoted in major international newspapers. His research has been presented to the European Central Bank and the World Bank.

Maurizio Pallante is a heretic and a cultural irregular. With a degree in literature, he works on ecological economics and environmental technologies. In 2007 he founded the Movement for Happy Degrowth. In 2019, he helped found the political-cultural association “Sustainability Equity Solidarity.”