The 2014-2020 LIFE programme, which is specifically devoted to the environment and climate, is a fine instrument the effectiveness of which can still be improved. It is still too early, however, to draw definitive conclusions, in view of the shortage of information in the European Commission’s mid-term evaluation reports, stated the MEPs on the European Parliament environment (ENVI) committee which met in Brussels on Tuesday 27 March.
With their virtually unanimous adoption (59 votes for with 1 abstention) of a draft resolution on the Commission’s communication of November 2017, the MEPs said they looked forward to an impact analysis for a permanent LIFE programme after 2020.
In the meantime, the effectiveness of the mechanisms for selecting projects needs to be improved, on the basis of merit, member states need to be encouraged to submit better quality projects and a better geographical balance of integrated projects has to be ensured.
The committee regretted that two member states had shared over one third of the entire LIFE budget for traditional subsidies for 2014 and 2015, leading to unequal sharing out of funding among the member states. It confirmed that national allocations did not permit a more balanced repartition of projects. Thus, it believes that it is a positive step that the current LIFE regulation provides for the phasing out of national allocations in the second multiannual work programme.
The MEPs were pleased to note that the Commission had concluded that LIFE was less expensive to manage than other similar programmes. They felt, nonetheless, that procedures for managing subsidies, in particular the arrangements for submitting proposals and for communicating information, must continue to be simplified and rationalised in order to reduce the administrative burden. They argued further that procedures should be speeded up given that all the simplification measures previously proposed have not been put into the current LIFE regulation.
Simplification must not be at the expense of the quality of the projects and the continuous monitoring of the use of funding, they warned.
The MEPs call on the European Commission to maintain its monitoring and its reporting on the effectiveness and efficiency of the projects using clearly defined qualitative and quantitative indicators. LIFE has a total budget of €3.4 billion (with €850 million of that for climate). (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)