Monitoring progress in Europe's circular economy

"The Bellagio process: Monitoring progress in Europe's circular economy" is an initiative taken by the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), which aims to consolidate key principles and areas for future work to improve the monitoring of circular economy.

Please find the final Bellagio declaration here

Circular Economy Action Plan

This process contributes to the objectives of Europe’s new Circular Economy Action Plan, a central part of the European Green Deal, which calls for improved metrics to monitor the progress towards circularity. This monitoring should cover the inter-linkages between circularity, climate neutrality and the zero-pollution ambition.

In addition, indicators on resource use, including consumption and material footprints, should be further developed.

Declaration of Principles

The Bellagio process was originally (pre COVID-19) envisioned as a two-day technical meeting in Bellagio, followed immediately after by a high-level segment for policy makers to endorse the principles developed by the technical meeting.

Following the lock-downs across Europe, the process was replaced by a virtual process that has run over the summer and autumn of 2020 (see below). Virtual sessions are by nature more compressed than physical meetings and as such leave little time for digestion of outcome. Therefore, in order to allow policy makers time to digest the outcome of the technical process before endorsing the declaration, the high-level segment has been shifted from a back-to-back session in October to a stand-alone session in December 2020.

If you have any questions, please contact Peder.Jensen@eea.europa.eu