European auditors criticize little EU support to sustainable investments

The European Court of Auditors warns that the European Union “does not contribute sufficiently” to channel investments towards sustainable activities. Is has also indicated that the action of the bloc in this field “will not be fully effective” if it is not accompanied by “complementary measures” to alleviate the social and environmental costs of the ecological transition.

The auditors point out, in a report published on Monday, September 20, that the EU’s path to climate neutrality “will require significant public and private investment”, calling on the bloc to adopt “more systematic measures” to to get it.

“Unsustainable activities are still too profitable. The Commission has done a great deal to show this lack of sustainability transparently, but a solution to this underlying problem has yet to be found,” said Eva Lindström, Member of the European Court of Auditors responsible of the report.

Thus, the European auditors affirm that the Community Executive “must apply coherent criteria” to establish the sustainability of investments that use European funds and “better guide efforts to generate sustainable investment opportunities.”

For this reason, they are emphatic in highlighting the importance of completing the common system of classification of sustainable activities and recommend “other additional measures to ensure that the prices of greenhouse gas emissions better reflect their environmental costs.”

On the other hand, the report of the European Court of Auditors underlines that the EU budget has not been fully subject to good practice in finance and lacks coherent and scientifically based criteria to avoid significant damage to the environment.” This fact “creates the risk of being able to apply inconsistent or insufficiently rigorous criteria to determine the environmental and social sustainability of the same activities financed by different EU programs“, including the recovery fund.

Source: dpa