Thank you very much, Ms. Chair. Thanks for the nice introduction of Germany so far.
What I can offer you is a practitioner's view of what we are doing here in Germany. I've been in the position of general secretary for the German Council for Sustainable Development since 2001, when all this started.
As a preliminary remark, I would like to share with you the notion that we in Germany find that the structure we have, with the institutions we have in place, is an okay structure. It is operational. It works. But I have to say that after we tried everything else, we kind of meandered our way into what we now have. We learned through the efforts and the tries in the nineties. We tried departmental approaches. They all failed. We tried approaches via Parliament that failed. We tried approaches via cities' involvement and only local agenda politics. They failed.
But now, I have to say, no institution or institutionalization is forever. That is why we are currently thinking about how to advance what we have in place in Germany. This is what I want to talk about for a couple of minutes.
First, institutions in a country follow purpose. We decided to keep with the term “sustainability”, to fill it and not discard it. There are problems with the vagueness of this term, of course, but then, with a substantive and ambitious national strategy for sustainable development, there's a kind of refreshment every other year of the term of sustainable development. It gets the notion to the people. People understand it. We see from polls that now almost 80% of the German population understands the term “sustainable development”. When we started out in 2001, it was 13%.
We decided to keep the term broad and to bring in environment, of course, most importantly, but also issues from the sides of social inclusion, social development of society, and the green economy. Once we're talking about sustainability, we are talking about energy, about resources, about housing problems, about gender, food, and health, and also about demography and inclusion in Germany. We are talking about budget issues, tax breaks, and the financial resources we will devote to innovation and research and development.
For all this, we think we need a high-level commitment in government. We need a central responsibility to ensure that this in our institutional set-up. It's like with the private sector; you need the involvement of the CEO. Otherwise, you'll get nothing at the end of the day. But once you have the CEO and the top level of government involved, then you have to ensure a bottom-up element to bring in people's voices. There is a coordination and coherence issue.
With all this at hand, we worked our way through the German institutions; I will explain which ones they are. Over the last 15 years, through five governments in four different colours, we kept the notion of sustainability on the highest level. I have to say that we did not compromise the environment through the issues from the economic or social side.
Now what we have in place is a mechanism on the government side, the so-called state secretaries for sustainable development. They meet every other week, chaired by the chief of staff of the German Chancellery. In our system it's the federal minister in the Chancellery, so one step behind Ms. Merkel.
We have had the German Council for Sustainable Development since 2001. The task of the council is to advise the federal government. At the top level is Ms. Merkel, as the prime minister. At that time it was Gerhard Schröder from the Social Democrats.
We are also advising the departments; we can do this as well. The chancellor appoints the members of the council in their personal capacity, so not by delegation from banks—the social bank, the economic bank, or the ecological bank—but in their personal capacity. We report back to the.... I report back to the chancellor. I have a seat in the state secretaries committee to close the gap between these two institutions. We are tasked with agenda-setting, and we can also do our own projects out of our own right. For this purpose we have a staff of 12 now. We have some budget, now around four million euros annually.
Third, we have a parliamentary advisory commission to the Parliament. They are tasked with the legal impact assessment of pieces of legislation, and they are as close as you can come in the German system to the institution of the ombudsman for future generations.
All these three institutions are light institutions—light because they have to be re-established every three years or every legislative term. They did not start their work with a kind of scientific design or a design by some politicians, but they started work as a step-by-step development of the portfolio piece with the institutions all centring around the issue of the sustainable development strategy.
This strategy comes with goals and targets. The indicators are independently monitored by the statistical office of Germany, and then there are written comments on the fact-finding, on the number-crunching, by the statisticians.
We have management rules in place, giving the departments some advice on how to develop their politics toward the goals of the national SD strategy. There are also some soft instruments here in play. As for the German council, we ourselves issue the German sustainable development codex, a code for companies, be they private or publicly run. For the company performance code and the transparency code we have the German sustainability award. It's a high-level, kind of an Oscar-type ceremony that awards enterprises and cities with the German sustainability award.
We have a review system in place. Already twice we have reviewed our government's system with the help of international experts. In the first review, in 2009, there was also a Canadian from your foreign ministry involved, and thanks for that.
Still, with the sustainability development goals already mentioned, the global goals already mentioned, we will have to redesign the national approach and we do so in this year. By the end of the year, we will have a relaunched national strategy, which follows the idea of the triple, the triple being the impact of the global goals for Germany. It says, first, that there are problems within Germany and we have to take care that we do the right thing here. Second, there are issues to be tackled through the German competencies, in industry or in the cities, that will help others in the world to solve their problems. Third, the help from Germany to developing countries will be increased financially.
To wrap it up, as I told you, nothing is finalized. We are currently thinking about how to better anchor the issue of sustainability in our constitution. We are thinking, together with our parliament, about ways and means to add it to the German constitution and to anchor the sustainability issue there.
Secondly, we're on our way to developing an outreach towards the regions in Germany, which is a federal country, and our parliament has provided me with some serious money to establish four regional hubs as kinds of reference centres to the work of the German Council for Sustainable Development.
Lastly, we are increasing coordination efforts within government by addressing certain sustainable development issues in so-called sectoral strategies that will follow on the overall comprehensive SD strategy that is run by the government itself.
Thank you for your attention.