Action on climate: proposed investments fail to convince
The European Union’s planned action on climate seemed solid and robust when the Commission made the commitment to allocate at least 20% of its available balance for 2014-2020 to initiatives focusing on safeguarding the environment and developing more sustainable technologies and production methods.
This investment aims to incentivise companies and individuals to take steps to combat the increasingly urgent issue of climate change, as it continues towards its critical threshold. While the main purpose is to speed up the process of achieving Carbon Neutrality, the European Court of Auditors has expressed several misgivings.
The amount allocated to climate action is not convincing
In a recent report, the European Commission announced that funds invested in climate action recently exceeded a total of 216 billion euros between 2014 and 2020 (approximately 20% of total funds). This is a very large amount which, at least in theory, is in line with the percentage of the budget previously allocated.
The Court of Auditors has nevertheless decided to investigate this matter and analyse the expenditure more closely; the results of this more detailed examination of the documentation provided paint a totally different picture to the scenario described by the EU.
The total investment figure seems in fact to have been overestimated by at least 72 billion euros. That means that the actual percentage of the EU budget dedicated to combatting climate issues is in reality just 13%, or 144 billion euros.
A source of concern for the auditors tasked with these checks is the risk that the same mistake could be made again regarding the years 2021-2027, a period during which, on the contrary, European funding of climate action projects is supposed to rise by 30 percent.
Scant checks and irrelevant investments
According to the auditors’ investigations, it seems that the real issue could be caused by a lack of checks on the actual relevance of the projects which are granted climate action funding.
While many initiatives have already benefitted from European grants (despite not being linked in any way with reaching environmental or energy targets), it is likely that the fault lies with the methods used to track these programmes.
The situation is further exacerbated by an almost total lack of regular monitoring of these projects by the designated organisations, so that they can keep track of them and provide solid evidence of the results.
This combination of oversights and shortcuts has cost Europe almost a third of its available budget, which has been wasted on supporting initiatives which look exemplary on paper but are in reality incompatible with climate issues.
Gaps in the system used to allocate funds
The system used to allocate incentives meant for climate action is aimed at three particular sectors: agriculture, infrastructure and cohesion. The various proposals are given coefficients, calculated according to their perceived contribution towards reaching European targets on the environment and sustainability.
The problem however, is that these figures are often unreliable and inaccurate, due to a tracking method based on theory rather than on genuine facts. Ascertaining the relevance of the respective programmes therefore becomes complicated, if not virtually impossible.
An even more serious problem with this approach is that the negative impact of some of these climate initiatives tends to be ignored. A striking example is that agricultural greenhouse gas emissions have not fallen since 2010, not even by one percent, despite the large number of projects focusing on that issue.
