With increasingly frequent episodes of drought, flooding and forest fires across Europe, an audit of EU spending and action on the ground suggests the bloc is not keeping up with a worsening situation – and as much as two-fifths of local projects are having little to no impact.
Europe is at risk of being overwhelmed by the effects of climate change unless it ups its game on adaptation, the EU Court of Auditors (ECA) warned on Wednesday.
“Our report…raises serious concerns about the EU’s ability to keep pace with the changing climate,” the ECA member who led the audit, Klaus-Heiner Lehne, said while briefing reporters ahead of publication.
“It’s a race between the accelerating impacts of climate change on our economies and societies and our efforts to adapt to these new and ever changing realities,” Lehne said.
The Luxembourg-based budget watchdog, which assesses the effectiveness on the ground of EU policy and funding, concluded that the bloc’s political and legislative approach to climate adaptation was generally sound, referencing in particular the adaptation strategy launched in 2013 and updated in 2021.
However, although it stresses the importance of building resilience to extremes of weather at the local level, the ECA found that 70% of 400 municipalities in the four countries surveyed – Austria, Estonia, France and Poland – were unaware of the EU strategy.
Moreover, 60% were unaware of their own governments’ national adaptation plans, and over half had never heard of regional adaptation plans already in place. Only around one in six had a local adaptation plan of their own – although the ECA took it as a “positive sign” that a fifth of them were “working on one”.
The auditors examined 36 projects in preparing their report, and concluded that a substantial number of them were wrong headed, and possibly even counter productive.
A spruce forest in Estonia destroyed by storms was replanted with spruce, despite it being “known for having low resistance to strong winds”. Maritime pine, planted in southwest France in a reforestation project, can tolerate both drought and high rainfall, but it was also “sensitive to forest fire and wind (both expected to increase due to climate change)”.
On the positive side, auditors approved an Austrian scheme to replace spruce devasted by bark beetle with a mixture of species, as biodiverse forests are more resistant to pests and climate extremes than monocultures.
The current Common Agricultural Policy contained no requirement to diversify forests. “This means that single-species forests can be funded by the CAP but will not address climate change,” the ECA concluded.
Unsurprisingly, auditors found a particularly acute need for climate adaptation in mountainous areas dependent on ski tourism. There was a “very high risk of insufficient snow” in around half of European resorts, with only those above 2000m relatively safe for now.
Some EU money has supported investment in snow cannons, but the report noted this leads to increased energy and water use, and a recent French audit suggested it was a form of “maladaptation” that offers only a short-term solution to climate change.
To avoid such mistakes, the ECA recommended the European Commission should strengthen reporting requirements on adaptation projects, using a system of common indicators to measure progress.
The EU executive should also raise awareness among local authorities about available EU funding, which runs to €26 billion over the current seven-year budget period. By coincidence, this figure is the same as the estimated average economic losses due to extreme weather events every single year over the past decade.
Of all projects examined, the ECA concluded that just over half “addressed climate risk effectively”, but 42% had “little or no impact on adaptive capacity”.
ADVERTISEMENTTo future-proof EU funding for climate adaptation, the Commission should provide more guidance to governments, including examples of maladaptation, the court said. The EU executive should draw up guidelines to help farmers “climate proof” their investments, and the revise eligibility criteria for forestry support “to avoid funding single-species forests”, the auditors said.
