Environmental Law Lecture series
Welcome to the Environmental Law Lecture Series! In this series, environmental law scholars will provide important insights into how EU environmental law helps to achieve a high level of environmental protection in the European Union and beyond.
Spending 658 billion euros on climate action:
Assessing the impact, effectiveness, and institutional implications of EU climate funding.
For the period 2021-2027, the EU wants to spend 30% of its budget on ‘climate action’, amounting to 658 billion euros. This presentation addresses three questions about this target and EU climate funding.
- First, how is the money spent: through which programs, and under which conditions? Most of this funding does not have climate change mitigation as its main objective, but is primarily directed at other EU policy areas, such as agriculture and cohesion. It is nonetheless classified as climate action, because the policies concerned can in some cases contribute to mitigating climate change.
- Secondly, how does the funding align with other EU environmental laws and policies? The EU has adopted many rules over the last few years to address climate change, the biodiversity crisis and pollution. Does this climate funding complement, reinforce, or potentially undermine these rules? A new principle of EU environmental law is related to funding: projects should “do no significant harm”, but the question is whether this principle is operationalised effectively.
- Lastly, the question is raised how this funding fits into the broader framework of European integration. Does the funding for climate change mitigation have an impact on how the EU as a whole is governed?
Watch it here on YouTube if you'd like to access the video transcript or jump chapters.
Key Themes
- Large-scale mainstreaming of climate spending: The EU has pledged to allocate 30% of its 2021–27 long-term budget and NextGenerationEU recovery funds to climate action – equivalent to around €658 billion over seven years. Importantly, this is not delivered through a single “climate fund” but by mainstreaming climate objectives across existing instruments such as the Common Agricultural Policy, Cohesion Funds and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
- Funding complements (not replaces) regulation: The EU’s regulatory framework (European Climate Law, Effort Sharing Regulation, ETS, etc.) still sets the core legal obligations. Funding instruments, including the RRF and cohesion policy programmes, follow these rules and are intended to support national implementation of legally binding targets. The financial tools do not replace or relax those obligations.
- Climate tracking and ‘green’ coefficients raise questions: To reach the 30% headline figure, the EU applies a climate tracking methodology using numerical coefficients (e.g., 40% or 100%) to classify spending as “climate-relevant”. In practice, this allows some questionable classifications (such as noise reduction or intelligent traffic systems being counted as climate expenditure), and makes it difficult to determine how much money is spent on actual mitigation.
- Safeguards: Do-No-Significant-Harm and the taxonomy: Most EU spending is subject to the Do-No-Significant-Harm (DNSH) principle – meaning it should not seriously harm other environmental objectives. However, applying DNSH outside the detailed technical criteria of the EU’s taxonomy regulation is difficult. As a result, the effectiveness of DNSH as a practical filter for climate spending is limited.
- Climate funding as a driver of EU integration: Beyond its environmental aims, EU climate funding also acts as a vehicle for further European integration. The 2020 Recovery and Resilience Facility (NextGenerationEU) was politically justified through the Green Deal and climate objectives, and has been used again to respond jointly to later crises (energy price spike after the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Climate spending thus enabled the EU to expand collective action in areas previously dominated by national competence.
Speaker
Dr. Marijn van der Sluis
He is an Assistant Professor in Constitutional Law at Maastricht University since January 2020. His research concerns the role of law in economic affairs, especially in European integration. Other topics of interest are privacy, transparency, green constitutional law and judicial appointment.
Lecture Series
This lecture is part of a series that runs from 2023 to 2025, providing students and scholars with core insights into the current state of EU environmental law and how it can be improved to achieve greater environmental protection. All lectures will be recorded and made accessible through YouTube, and the series is freely accessible to all.
If you'd like to know more about the other upcoming lectures:
This GreenDeal-Net lecture serie is hosted by MCEL, METRO and organised in cooperation with GLaw-Net and GreenDeal-NET. Maastricht University students will be eligible for certificates of attendance (see more information under the registration link).