Mainstreaming climate change in regional development policy in Europe: four insights from the 2007-2013 programming period

Mainstreaming climate mitigation and adaptation concerns into EU policy sectors recently became one of the European Commission’s priorities. The Structural and Cohesion Funds (SCF) are a potentially important instrument for supporting climate policy-related efforts and addressing unevenly distributed capacities for successful mitigation and adaptation across the EU. This paper reports on the current level of climate mainstreaming in EU regional development policy: First, we explore the normative commitment to climate change concerns through an analysis of key national strategy documents for European regional development policy for all 27 member countries. Second, we analyze the substantive commitments by mapping financial allocations from the SCF related to climate mitigation and adaptation. We find that mitigation appears well mainstreamed in EU cohesion policies in normative terms, which is supported by increasing financial investments. Adaptation however is hardly considered. Even though potentially adaptation-relevant priorities and measures are being included at a rhetoric level, they are not backed by adequate substantial investments. Increased earmarking of SCF for climate purposes may be the most effective means for bringing cohesion policy in line with the EU 2020 strategy and its mitigation and adaptation objectives. Thereby, cohesion policy also gains meaning as a burden sharing instrument in the context of climate change.

HANGER Susanne;  HAUG Constanze;  LUNG Tobias;  BOUWER Laurens M.; 

2015-10-13

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

JRC82305

1436-3798,   

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10113-013-0549-9,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC82305,   

10.1007/s10113-013-0549-9,