Images: Security & Defence Agenda [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr (l), Ionutzmovie [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons (r)
Research and education left out of EU roadmap
Academic leaders have expressed their concerns after the EU published a plan for recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic that makes no reference to research or education.
The roadmap, drafted by the European Council and the European Commission, was presented to national leaders on 21 April for discussion by teleconference on 23 April. It says there is a need for “unprecedented investment that will help us relaunch and transform our economies”, but does not specifically mention research and education organisations or their activities.
Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of the League of European Research Universities, said it was “worrying” that the plan “does not mention once (!) the word ‘research’ or ‘education’”. Mattias Björnmalm, a policy adviser to the Cesaer group of science and technology universities and vice-chair of policy at the Marie Curie Alumni Association, asked how academia might be able to get the roadmap changed.
The roadmap, which seeks not only to mitigate the economic fallout from the pandemic but also to build “a more resilient, sustainable and fair Europe”, does refer to knowledge-fuelled Commission priorities such as the environmental and digital transformations of the EU’s economies, but not the means that will achieve them.
Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has put the 2021-27 EU budget at the centre of her economic plan for recovery, saying that the Commission will present a revised proposal for the budget and that it must invest in “innovative research”.
The day before leaders were due to discuss the roadmap, two members of the European Parliament published a statement saying that the pandemic “had clearly demonstrated the need for the EU and its member states to invest more in R&D”.
“The answer to fight Covid-19 is research and innovation. The answer to [tackling a] potential future pandemic is research, innovation and new technologies,” said MEP Dan Nica (pictured right), coordinator for the centre-left Socialists and Democrats group in the Parliament’s research committee.
Christian Ehler (pictured left), Nica’s counterpart in the centre-right European People’s Party, warned that as the budget of the EU’s 2021-27 R&D programme Horizon Europe had not yet been agreed, it was open to “cannibalisation”.
He said that unless the budget was increased from the €83.5 billion in 2018 prices originally proposed by the Commission to the €120bn demanded by the Parliament and academia, “we will have to decide between fighting the coronavirus, ensuring economy growth, boosting digitalisation or reducing carbon dioxide emissions”.