European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen’s first State of the Union address delivered a courageous and hopeful vision for a sustainable future of welfare and wellbeing.

However, the EU’s environmental ambitions and targets still fail to live up to this rhetoric.

On Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen presented her first State of the Union address during which she looked back over her remarkable first year at the helm of the European Commission, which was marked with a groundbreaking European Green Deal and the COVID-19 pandemic which has resulted in the greatest socioeconomic crisis in generations.

“In these last six months, Europeans have shown how strong that human spirit really is,” the Commission president observed. She spoke of how the coronavirus had “brought into sharper focus the planetary fragility that we see every day through melting glaciers, burning forests and, now, through global pandemics.”

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