50% of the spending that the EU counts under its climate umbrella isn’t actually to be spent on reducing CO2 emissions: instead, it is funding the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy.
When then-defence minister for Germany Ursula von der Leyen ran for the European Union’s top job last year, she pitched herself as a climate enthusiast.
“We must go further. We must strive for more,” she said during her candidate speech at the European Parliament. “I want Europe to become the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050.”
She got the job, and has been serving as European Commission president since December.
Under her leadership, the commission — though the initial proposal pre-dates her presidency — suggested spending 25% of the European Union’s seven-year budget and the coronavirus recovery package on “climate targets.”
The EU governments pushed for even more, and committed to spending 30% of the EU’s budget on climate — a 10% jump from the 2014-20 budget. With a total package of 1.8tn euros ($2.1tn), the climate tag comes in at 600bn euros.
But while that might sound good on paper, environmentalists remain sceptical.
“The problem is right now it’s turned into massive greenwashing,” said Berenice Dupeux, senior policy officer for agriculture at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of various environmental groups.
She said most of the spending that the EU counted under its climate umbrella — about 50% — isn’t actually to be spent on the environment: instead, they went to the union’s Common Agriculture Policy, without setting additional climate criteria.
And a large chunk of that money was paid out as direct payment to farmers to support their income, she said.
Yet, as the commission expects farmers to respect environmental regulations the EU had put in place, it automatically counts 20% of direct payments as going towards the climate target.
But as standards were simply the bare minimum, Dupeux said, and no one checked what the farmers use the money for, the percentage didn’t reflect reality.
Dupreux alleged that much of this approach, which she said lacked scientific evidence, stemmed from political pressure.
The commission is often dependent on the approval of the 27 governments in the bloc, so its rules aimed at striking a balance between the different interests.
The national agricultural ministers, in turn, wouldn’t agree on cutting funding from direct farmers and financing pure climate activities instead, she said.
“Politically, they will not survive if they do that. They don’t want to touch the pot of money that is spent for social issues and shift it to climate,” she said.
The European Commission rejected the allegation. “This is the biggest green investment package the world has ever seen,” a commission spokesperson said.
“The ambitions for a greener, more digital and more resilient Europe will remain guiding principles of the Next Generation EU and the next long-term budget.”
The spokesperson said that it followed a “clear and well-established” methodology to measure progress, namely the so-called Rio markers.
The Rio markers measure whether reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the principal objective of an activity, a secondary but significant objective, or if it does not target climate change at all.
Depending on that assessment, it attributes how many per cent of a spending activity went to climate.
For Dupeux, the EU’s use of this method failed to produce any tangible results as it didn’t look into the actual effects a project had on climate.
