The European Commission has put forward a proposal for a new long-term EU budget that reduces existing funding for climate and nature, leaving Europeans ill-equipped to deal with the ever-worsening climate and biodiversity crisis, amid yet another summer plagued by heatwaves, wildfires and floods.
While WWF welcomes the Commission’s decision to maintain a spending target for climate and biodiversity, now presented under a broader environmental spending target of 35%, we are concerned that the level of ambition remains lower than in the previous budget. This contradicts the Commission’s own economic evidence that public investments in climate and biodiversity need to be urgently increased, including from the EU budget. A global target for environmental priorities will also put biodiversity in competition with other more easily investable green projects. Such a move risks deprioritising nature.
More importantly, the impact of this target could be seriously dampened by continued and significant flaws in the Commission’s methodology for tracking green spending. A lack of sector-specific targets risks further diluting the ambition. It is now up to the co-legislators to raise the bar and ensure that at least 50% of the budget is directed towards true climate and biodiversity investments.
“The 35% global target for environmental priorities risks becoming little more than a PR exercise by the European Commission if it is not backed by robust and transparent tracking methodologies, along with clear guarantees that Member States will use their new national envelopes to invest in nature and climate,” says Ester Asin, Director of WWF European Policy Office. “By grouping all environmental spending under a single target, there is a real danger that biodiversity will be sidelined in favour of industrial priorities that may be presented as green investments”.
The European Commission is still expected to publish its detailed legislative proposals, which should also clarify the uncertain future of the LIFE Programme – the only EU instrument dedicated exclusively to nature, climate and the environment – as well as its plans to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies under the MFF. According to the latest leaks, the LIFE programme could be discontinued in the next MFF. This inexplicable move would dramatically reduce funding for biodiversity action and would de facto put an end to any conservation work in large parts of Europe, at a time when funding for nature should be scaled up to ensure the implementation of the Nature Restoration Law.
