"The need for a transition of the automotive industry and the overall objective to reduce CO2 emissions in the (road) transport sector should not be questioned. But, over 1 million jobs in car parts manufacturing and supply chain might be lost, 2.4 million workers will need radical upskilling and retraining. Hence why we need a just transition in the automotive sector that takes into account territorial impact." Adrian Teban, the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) Rapporteur for the opinion on 'Towards zero emission road transport: Deploying alternative fuels infrastructure and strengthening CO2 emission performance standards' made these remarks during a COTER Commission meeting.
Teban, who serves as Mayor of Cugir, outlined that phasing-out of combustion engine cars will influence the automotive industry, which will undergo a fundamental cross-cutting transformation process. "This transition will affect the production process of the car companies but also the automotive suppliers. It will affect the workforce through the need for re-skilling in the light of the "green and digital" transition. It will affect the need for energy and clean energy production. It will therefore affect all regions with a link to the automotive industry, a sector which accounts for almost six million jobs in the core automotive and adjacent supply chains."
In this regard the rapporteur proposed a European Mechanism for a just transition of the automotive sector and regions which needs to be inclusive for the whole automotive sector and needs to be based on data that clearly maps the territorial impact of the legislation. His opinion stresses that such mechanism needs to provide targeted funding for regions through existing European funds and make sure it addresses challenges in the regions most affected by the transformation reaching all SMEs in the supply chain to adapt to the changes in the automotive value chain. To this end, the CoR is planning to launch an Alliance for a sustainable and inclusive transformation of automotive regions to obtain the assurance that the European regions would be fully involved into any new structured cooperation scheme set up by the Commission in relation to the transformation of the automotive sector.
The rapporteur tabled various other amendments to EU proposed regulations. He called for low-emission vehicles and fuels like advanced bio-fuels to be considered in regions where zero-emission electric vehicles are hard to deploy. He therefore called on such vehicles not be excluded from the single market from 2035 onward. He further underlined that from a regional perspective, various ranges of technical solutions must be considered such as hydrogen, synthetic bio-fuels or bio-gas solutions which could address in the short and medium term CO2 emissions from the transport sector. With respect to the needed up-skilling and retraining, the rapporteur called for investments in vocational and high-tech education required for the new skills in electric mobility to be made available for the local level.
Following today's first discussion and adoption, the opinion in planned to be adopted in the CoR plenary session taking placed between 26-28 January 2022.
