EU auditors accuse the Commission of inflating the green spending of the European budget

The La Viñuela reservoir, located in La Axarquia, in the province of Malaga. Álex Zea (Europa Press)

One in three euros of the EU budget between 2014 and 2020 that the European Commission classified as spending for the fight against climate did not deserve that

.

The total amount that this bad cataloging would have amounts to 72,000 million euros, according to the Court of Auditors of the EU.

"The community budget [for combating climate change] for 2014-2020 was not as high as reported," says Joëlle Elvinger, a member of the court.

The also director of the audit published this Monday clarifies that part of the financing that was said in the previous accounts of the Community Executive "was not always relevant to climate action."

The community auditors also point out that there are cases in which "the possible negative effects (for example, the negative impact of carbon emissions)" of the proposed investments are not taken into account.

Conclusion: the real budgetary ambition in the fight against climate change was lower than what was proclaimed.

The EU accounts are approved for a period of seven years, hence the years examined by the auditors range from 2014 to 2020, which include executives led by the Portuguese José Manuel Durão Barroso (a few months in 2014), the Luxembourger Jean -Claude Juncker (2014-2019) and the German Ursula von der Leyen (2019-2020).

In those seven years, the budget approved by the Community Executive amounted to just over a billion euros and of this amount, which is somewhat less than the size of the Spanish GDP, 20% was money that was destined, in theory, to the fight against climate change: 216,000 million.

However, the Court of Auditors questions this qualification and lowers the figure by those 72,000 million in the first audit of this type carried out.

That theoretical percentage of 20% of the common budget allocated to the fight against climate change would point to the high degree of commitment that Brussels has in this battle to mitigate global warming and pursue a transition to an economy that is less harmful to the environment.

This explains why the current Von der Leyen Executive has placed the ecological transition at the forefront of its policies, which has a great role in the Recovery Fund, the great commitment of this Commission after the pandemic, and which it already had before in the package known as

which aims to reduce emissions in the EU by 55% by 2030 over those emitted 40 years earlier.

However, the Court of Auditors, with this audit, reduces the budgetary effort previously made from 20% to 13%.

And he points out, already for the accounts currently in force, “his concern about the reliability of the climate reports [...].

Despite the improvements proposed in the notification methodology, most of the problems detected in the previous period persist.

The objective of the current budgets is to allocate 30% to the fight against climate change, recalls the supervisory body, that is, about 600,000 million.

“We do not make the reports for the gallery.

We hope there will be changes, and in fact there have already been improvements in climate reporting for the period 2021-2027, for example in the European Social Fund, but in other areas surprisingly the same framework as for 2014 and up continues to apply. 2020″, says Elvinger after being questioned about the consequences of her work.

The member of the court emphasizes that there have already been modifications in "the climate coefficients of some financing programs to improve alignment with the real contribution to climate action."

The auditors of the EU point out that the Commission estimates spending against climate change based on a triple qualification for the projects and investments it finances.

If the Brussels Executive considers that a project has a significant impact on the objective of reducing emissions or other environmental goals, 100% of what is budgeted is considered green spending;

if the contribution is moderate, accounting lowers it to 40%;

and if it is low or null, it stays at 0%.

The court does not disagree with this taxonomy, but it does disagree with the labels that are later assigned to policies and projects.

“In some cases, spending is considered climate relevant, even though the projects and programs it supports have little or no climate impact (for example, infrastructure in rural areas).

In other cases,

One of the policies in which there are more discrepancies between the Community Executive and the body based in Luxembourg are the agricultural items, which consume half of the money that, theoretically, is allocated to the environmental fight.

In this section, for example, the auditors point out that investments that do not have a direct ecological impact, but are justified by seeking food security or animal welfare, should not be considered expenditure chapters with a moderate contribution to climate change and, therefore, 40% of this bill should not be counted as environmental.

Only this difference in criteria subtracts 17,500 million from the effort in the fight against climate change.

Organic farming and the aid it receives are also a reason for discrepancy: “A coefficient of 100% was attributed to it, which means a significant contribution to the climate, and we are reevaluating it.

We have a coefficient of 40%, which means a moderate contribution to the climate”, says one of the auditors who has prepared the report.

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