Could Cohesion Policy push EU climate efforts?

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this article is to evaluate the extent to which the Cohesion Policy of the EU contributes to its climate change mitigation effort. While climate change mitigation and the EU Cohesion Policy have been both thoroughly studied theoretically, the novelty of the present article lies in an analysis of their mutual relationship. Also, a unique feature of this research is an analysis of the contribution of the Cohesion Policy to climate change mitigation over a period of 20 years, including a comparison of the three last programming periods (2000–2006, 2007–2013 and 2014–2020). The results of this research suggest that, while the beginning of the new millennium saw the Cohesion Policy neglecting the issue of climate change mitigation, the current programming period (2014–2020) placed it among its key priorities. This conclusion is supported by a comprehensive set of data on five selected indicators. This article also displays the results against the perspective of the overall climate change mitigation objectives of the EU.

POLICY RELEVANCE

The present article shows how a policy, which used to be considered rather distant from climate change, progressively adopted climate change mitigation as one of its principal objectives. As such, it provides a practical guidance on the integration of climate change mitigation in other policy areas, which may be applied not only in a supranational organisation but also on a national, regional or local level.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Cohesion Policy
• European Union
• indicators
• mitigation
• selection criteria

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Michal Nekvasil http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7816-154X

Notes

1. The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted in 1997, entered into force in 2005.

2. The EU budget represents approximately 1% of the EU countries’ GDP. Ca 32.5% of the overall budget is devoted to the Cohesion Policy (European Commission – DG Budget (2015)). The share of climate-related investments in the Cohesion Policy budget is approx. 16.29% (see the calculation in the article) in 2014–2020, i.e. ca 0.05% of the EU countries’ GDP.

3. The Rio Conventions signed in 1992 deal with Climate change, Biological diversity and Desertification. A scoring system (so-called ‘Rio markers’) of three values is used, in which development co-operation activities are ‘marked’ as targeting the Rio Conventions as a ‘principal’ objective (100%) or a ‘significant’ objective (40%), or as not targeting the objective at all (0%).

4. 2000–2006: 0.56 (direct climate investments) + 3.79 (indirect climate investments × 0.4 (coefficient) = 2.1% 2007. –2013: 4.7 (direct climate investments) + 9.2 (indirect climate investments) × 0.4 (coefficient) = 8.4% 2014. –2020: 16.29%

5. This assumption would be valid if the EU ETS was based fully on market principles (which is not yet the case – a lot of emission allowances are still given for free, which decreases their price).