2. The great global challenges
 Climate Change
 Biodiversity loss
 Energy supply
 Natural resources depletion
 Feeding 9 billion people
Successfully addressing them is essential to a
stable world. Solving one without the others,
solves none.

3. Roadmap to a Resource
Efficient Europe
Key Messages:
 Huge increase in resource use in 20th
century. Business as usual will bring rapid
depletion and scarcity.
 We need 4-10 fold increase in RE by 2050
which implies all resources are sustainably
managed.

4. Roadmap to a Resource
Efficient Europe
Steps: developing approaches to transform the
economy in areas such as:
 Consumption and production
 Waste
 Ecosystem services
Of major interest here:
 Green paper on phosphorus in 2012
 Communication on land use in 2014

5. Why is phosphorus a policy issue?
 P is limited and P demand rises continuously
globally.
 P is easily lost throughout the production, use
and waste chains.
 P supplies are essential to long term food
production. They are concentrated in a few
regions.
 In the long term, we will need to use P
sources which may contain greater amounts
of cadmium and eventually even uranium.

7. Current P supplies

8. P from the earth’s crust to
human consumption

9. Cadmium levels in phosphate rock
including the relative size of the reserve

10. Why act now?
 Major education process to be undertaken
 Opportunity cost of inaction - sooner we
start, the more gradual action can be
 Need to insert some of the solutions into the
cycle of intellectual reflections and
infrastructure planning - expensive otherwise

11. Why act now?
 Synergies with resource efficiency agenda in
particular
 Innovation benefit to EU biotech companies –
enzymes in feed and fertilizer for example
 Experience on biodiversity decline and climate
change shows knowledge itself is not enough
to change behaviour. We must start early.

12. What could be done (examples)
 Improve efficiency of extraction processes and use of
by-products
 Traditional agricultural efficiency techniques – catch
crops, avoiding soil erosion etc –
 And new ones, manure processing and transfer
 Innovative techniques – microbial inoculation,
phytase, etc
 Sewage sludge, biowaste? Getting more recycling
and opening up the possibilities for the organic
fertilizer market
 Food chain, food waste, food choices...

13. What could be done in
a perfect world

14. Work on green paper to date
Several studies
 P use in EU agriculture 2005
 Sustainability of P resources 2010
 Manure Processing activities in Europe (end 2011 publication)
 NPK study (JRC, completion in early 2012)
 Expert seminar spring 2011
Some results
 Resources and reserves bigger then previously thought
 Some regions including EU very import dependent
 Considerable inefficiencies in P use
 Manure processing gaining in importance

15. Work on green paper to date
Opportunities for efficiencies?
 Agriculture
 Industry
Areas for reflection
 Animal production concentration
 Pathways to P loss: erosion, run off leaching
from saturated soil
 Do our production/consumption patterns
contribute to “problems”
 What recycling possibilities/what barriers?

16. Next steps
 A green paper opens discussion
 We hope to publish GP in spring/summer
2012
 Reaction of all stakeholders as well as EU
institutions will guide future work
 We invite you to contribute