EU Performance Regulation: Fixing the details

EU Performance Regulation: fixing the details to ensure an EU budget that delivers for climate and environment

ClientEarth, together with T&E, WWF, CEE Bankwatch, CAN Europe, HEAL and EEB, endorsed by 13 additional organisations, published a briefing on the proposed Performance Regulation - a key law shaping how climate and environmental spending will be tracked in the next EU long-term budget.

The EU budget amounts to more than 1 trillion euro to be spent over 7 years (MFF 2028-2034). The proposed Performance Regulation introduces, for the first time, a single framework to track climate and environmental spending across the entire EU budget. This positive governance evolution could ensure a more impactful and streamlined EU budget with increased transparency and accountability.

However, in its proposed version, the regulation has some grave shortcomings. If these are not addressed, large amounts of the EU budget risk being unjustifiably labelled as climate and environmental spending. Our main concerns are:

• The proposed environmental and climate spending target is insufficient to address the climate and nature crises and needs to be increased from 35% to 50%.
• We are proposing revisions to more than 100 interventions of Annex I, which defines how climate and environmental spending is tracked across EU programmes. The purpose of these revisions is to reduce the risk of greenwashing in EU spending and strengthen the credibility of the tracking framework.

Addressing these concerns is essential to have an EU budget that delivers to accelerate the clean transition and address the triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, that are essential to strengthen Europe’s long-term resilience and security.