Report: EU climate plans may be too pricey
BRUSSELS – The European Union’s auditing agency warned Monday that there might not be sufficient financing available to meet the bloc’s ambitious climate targets.
The warning from the Court of Auditors comes as the 27-nation bloc is struggling to live up to its image as the global leader in working toward climate neutrality because of a political fight in the EU legislature to push through environmental protection measures.
In a 63-page report, the court also noted that the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, did not include all greenhouse gas emissions in its tallies, which might lead to overly optimistic statistics. The report’s authors also found some of the commission’s accounting too opaque.
Regarding its finding on financing, the court said that 30% of the 2021-2027 budget was to be spent on climate action, or about 87 billion euros ($95 billion) a year.
“This amount is less than 10% of the total investment needed to reach the 2030 targets, estimated at around 1 euros trillion per year,” the report said.
The auditors complained they had “no information that sufficient financing will be made available to reach the 2030 targets, in particular from the private sector. The commission also reported that member states have a lack of collective ambition towards achieving the 2030 energy efficiency target, which had already proven to be the hardest to achieve by 2020.”
It puts the EU in a tough spot. The European Parliament had a committee vote scheduled for Tuesday on a nature restoration plan that has deeply divided the bloc. The plan is part of a far bigger project for the EU to become climate neutral by 2050.
It includes a wide range of measures, from reducing energy consumption to sharply cutting transportation emissions and reforming the EU’s trading system for greenhouse gases.
The European Commission said it wanted to keep all actions interlinked for optimal impact.
“(Climate financing in the budget) is less than 10% of the total investment needed to reach the 2030 targets ...”
EU Court of Auditors report