CLIMATE CHANGE: EU Emissions to Rise, Despite Claims

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Apr 26 2007 (IPS) - One month after the European Union’s leaders promised robust action against climate change, green campaigners have accused key EU bodies of implementing policies that will lead to increased emissions of greenhouse gases.

The organisation Friends of the Earth says that officials in charge of regional aid have not paid heed to the need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas triggering climate change.

Aside from agriculture, aid to the EU’s poorest regions is the biggest area of expenditure in the Union’s budget.

In a new report, Friends of the Earth analyses spending plans for EU aid to the eight central and eastern European countries that joined the Union in 2004, as well as Romania and Bulgaria, that joined in January 2007.

Of a total of 117 billion euros (159 billion dollars), earmarked for these ten states in 2007-13, almost 30 percent will go to transport. Half of all aid to transport will go to roads and motorways, even though rising car and truck traffic is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions from the countries concerned.

By prioritising roads over less polluting modes of transport such as rail, public funds are being used to encourage people to switch from using the trains to taking their cars, the organisation claims.

Budapest, the Hungarian capital, is among the cities which reduced subsidies to public transport in the 1990s, while the number of cars per person in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Lithuania is already higher than in the more affluent Denmark.

Martin Konecny from Friends of the Earth said there is a “big gap between rhetoric and reality” in the EU’s policy on climate change.

“On the one hand, the EU is making genuine efforts to do something about climate change,” he told IPS. “On the other hand, their funding policy is one of ‘business as usual’.”

In March, the EU’s heads of state and government committed themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. This cut would be increased to 30 percent if other rich countries agreed to follow suit, the leaders said.

Yet Friends of the Earth said that Poland, the largest of the EU’s newest entrants, has plans that would lead to a 31 percent increase in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2013 compared to 2003 under its national strategy for jobs and growth.

A Polish diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was a “bit surprised” by this contention and that he did not know the data on which it is based. However, he said that Poland had to develop its industry and that “it is not so easy to go forward if we have to have a low level of emissions.”

Friends of the Earth also found that only Lithuania “can be said to be taking energy efficiency and renewable energy seriously” in the proposals it has submitted for using EU aid. The Baltic state plans to allocate 5 percent of its EU aid to these sectors.

Although energy efficiency and generation from renewable sources are considered crucial for addressing climate change, Poland and Hungary are only allocating around 1 percent of their EU aid to these.

One pressing need, according to green activists, is to renovate the high-rise residential buildings common in Europe’s former communist countries so that they consume less energy.

Friends of the Earth describes these buildings as “notoriously wasteful” with heat. It cites estimates that refurbishing high-rise buildings in Europe would cost 25 billion euros (34 billion dollars), and argues that the eventual savings in energy bills would make the investment worthwhile.

Speaking in the German city of Stuttgart Apr. 25, the European commissioner for regional policy Danuta Huebner acknowledged that the aid she administers must tackle the impact of climate change. The aid, she said, is being used to address the side effects of EU policies in other areas in a way that takes account of the socio-economic traits of particular regions.

The EU’s lending arm, the European Investment Bank (EIB), has also been criticised for its environmental record.

Bankwatch, a network of green groups, has issued a new study on the 112 billion euros (152 billion dollars) that the EIB handed over to transport projects in 1996-2005. It argued that the EIB is showing a bias towards the most environmentally destructive forms of transport, as more than half of its loans have gone to roads and to aviation.

Total carbon dioxide emissions from airport expansion projects financed by the bank such as those at London’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol and Madrid Bajaras are likely to exceed the individual yearly emissions of Ireland, Norway, Slovakia, New Zealand or Switzerland, should the new capacities be fully used, Bankwatch estimates. It also finds that car manufacturers have been among the main recipients of EIB loans to private industry.

“All the evidence points to the EIB’s tendency to be led by its clients’ wishes rather than responding to the long-term challenges facing Europe and the rest of the world,” said Anelia Stefanova, transport coordinator with Bankwatch. “The planes, loans and automobiles culture at the EIB has to end.”

An EIB spokeswoman described the Bankwatch report as “well-informed” but claimed that it examined policies that have since been modified.

The EIB is the world’s biggest public international financial institution in terms of volume of loans.

Its spokeswoman said that it has been given a mandate to support EU policies on transport but that it strives to integrate environmental criteria into all of the loan decisions that it makes.