29. Welcomes the Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme and the political targets agreed at the Vienna High Level Meeting on Energy in September 2010, to be reached by 2020, including bringing access to modern and sustainable energy services to an additional 100 million Africans, doubling the capacity of cross-border electricity connections within Africa and doubling the use of natural gas in Africa, and increasing the use of renewable energy in Africa and improving energy efficiency in Africa in all sectors;

Investment in research and innovation must increase at Community level, through the research framework programme of the "Intelligent Energy - Europe" programme and the European Investment Bank, as well as in the Member States, in order to double the overall effort made in the EU within three years.

To respond to these demands, and despite the absence of agreement on the Constitutional Treaty, the EU has taken a number of significant steps forward: agreement to a seven year financial framework, a reinvigorated agenda for growth and jobs under the revised Lisbon Strategy, a new social agenda, a reformed Stability and Growth Pact, an Action Plan to strengthen the EU area of freedom, security and justice, a doubling of official development aid by 2010, as well as political agreement on sensitive issues such as legislation on services and chemicals, and agreement to the outline of a new energy policy.

2. Supports the Commission’s intention (as expressed in COM(2004)0590) to establish a European Security Research Programme (ESRP), commencing in 2007, as an independent specific research programme, with its own set of procedures (i.e. adapted to confidentiality requirements), rules of participation, contracts and financial instruments, within the 7th Framework Programme of Community Research; nevertheless encourages the Commission to further clarify the basic objectives and concrete implementation of the programme, and to further specify the priority level of this programme in comparison with the other programmes; calls on the Commissio ...[+++]n to take into account that security research is a new research area for the programme which should be financed in addition to the planned doubling of funds under the 7th Framework Programme;

At Community level, a doubling of RD expenditure is proposed under the seventh framework programme and a number of policy measures are foreseen to facilitate RD expenditure in the Member States.

For this to happen, the Commission's proposal for the new Community RTD Framework Programme (2002-2006) foresees an increased activity in the area of Human Resources focusing on training and mobility, by almost doubling the previous budget foreseen for the same purpose in the 5th Framework Programme and by multiplying the opportunities for grants, covering many specific cases, particularly interesting for the less favoured regions (a ...[+++]s it is the case with the re-integration grants).