On 6 June 2014, a parliamentary breakfast was held in Berlin on "Strategies and Options for Resource Policy in Germany". In order to allow for an exchange between policy, academia and business, the Resource Policy research project (PolRess) invited members of the German Parliament and resource policy experts to a debate. Dr. Martin Hirschnitz-Garbers acted as moderator of the event.

Short presentations from DirProf. Dr. Christian Hey (Secretary General of the German Advisory Council on the Environment, SRU) and Dr. Klaus Jacob (Research Director of the Research Center of Environmental Policy, FU Berlin, FFU) initiated participant discussions on necessary actions and possibilities to strengthen resource policy in Germany.

Considering concrete synergies between environmental and economic policy, resource policy has a significant role while combining competitiveness and future potential in accordance to sustainable development as well as maintaining planetary borders. As existing market mechanisms are considered insufficient to leverage synergies along the entire value chain, political instruments are needed to support this process. They should be combined within packages of political measures (policy mixes) and be directly related to respective resource-based and sectoral questions to foster innovation capabilities of German economy and society in the best possible way. In this context, politics need to provide a frame that encourages industry and economy to pursue innovation towards available synergies and which empowers relevant technologies to reach market maturity though costs for using raw materials and minimizing environment impact will be higher in the future. For the specific organization of such instruments, like abolition of distorting subsidies or research funding for specific promising technologies, further dialogue processes will be needed in order to prepare the best possible way for designing the implementation together.