27th EU-Japan Summit Overview

Today the EU and Japan signed the “EU-Japan Green Alliance” during the 27th EU-Japan summit, which also occurred today. So what’s happened? 

Firstly, European Council President, Charles Michel and European Commision President, Ursula Von der Leyen represented the EU at this summit while Japan was represented by their PM Yoshihide Suga. What did they discuss though? Quite a lot, and they said quite a few interesting things:

So first I’ll talk about the Green Alliance, in it they didn’t concretely say they would actually do anything, but they “intend” to do a lot of things. They reaffirmed many of their pre-existing commitments to do with the environment and GHG emissions, and to make sure COP26 has tangible outcomes. They also “intend to share knowledge and experiences” in many sectors including an equal transition leaving no-one behind, smart cities and decarbonisation on a local level.

Their “priority areas for cooperation” are:

• Cooperation on energy transition

• Environmental protection

• Regulatory and business cooperation

• Research and development

• Sustainable finance 

Some of their stated aims from those include:

• Decarbonising the gas sector, while recognising its importance in the transition, which is interesting given that the controversial Nord Stream 2 project has been talking a lot about the importance of gas in the transition too.

• Conserving biodiversity through the use of protected areas, and aiming for 30% of the land and seas to be protected globally.

• Encouragement of innovation through regulatory cooperation

• Collaboration between Horizon Europe (the EU’s big R&D project) and it’s Japanese counterpart, Moonshot Goals

• Continuing to help investors identify sustainable investments

They also want to help other countries with their transition, including possible cooperation with ASEAN.

On a fun side note about the Green Alliance, the EU’s environment page on Instagram’s post talking about it specifically said that “Japan is a partner we can rely on”. It’s funny they mention that since it’s well known that Europe has lost a lot of trust in America in recent years.

In the summit they also talked about global vaccine distribution and working towards the end of the pandemic and the prevention of new ones.They want to deepen cooperation, especially between their industrial, scientific, R&D and space sectors.

They talked about increasing cooperation with ASEAN to ensure a free and open indo-pacific, as well as expressing their “serious concern about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.” They also said they “will consult and coordinate closely” in several regions, including Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Ukraine among many others.

Overall I think this summit represents a tightening of ties between the two, as China becomes an increasing threat and that we will see this trend growing. Japan is also one of the few countries who could really bring Europe into the Indo-Pacific region, in my opinion at least, so I think we’ll be seeing a lot more mutual cooperation over the coming years.