On Tuesday 28 June in Luxembourg, the Environment Ministers of the EU27 will be invited to give their opinion on the creation of a Social Climate Fund. The issue remains closely linked to the directive extending the ETS to road transport and buildings.
Many points remained unresolved during the last discussions among the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper), notably on the duration and the size of the Fund, which some Member States still want to reduce. Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany among others would like to see a reduction in the size of this Fund, which should eventually reach €72 billion, according to the European Commission’s text. Other countries, on the contrary, want to increase it.
A new compromise text was drafted on 25 June and submitted to the delegations after a new discussion on 24 June.
The text contains among other points “proposals for adjustments to the amount redistributed among Member States, aimed at addressing the concerns of delegations while maintaining a fair balance between the necessary flexibility and the need to preserve its level of contribution to the objective of the ‘Fit for 55’ package”, explains the French Presidency in the text.
“Member States are to auction allowances (...) up to an amount of €59,000,000,000 to be transferred to the Fund”. “Once transferred to the Fund, a maximum financial allocation should be calculated for each Member State in accordance with an allocation key providing in particular additional support to those Member States that are more impacted by the inclusion of the building and road transport in the scope of Directive 2008/37/EC. This results in a net amount of a maximum of €18,600,000,000 being redistributed among Member States”, the amended recital states.
The text includes other adjustments, for example on the definition of a household, a technical building system and on the share of national social plans that can be linked in the governance to the cohesion policy.
No consensus could be reached last week on any unresolved points. However, a diplomat said on 26 June that Tuesday’s discussion could “tie up the loose ends”.
See the text: https://aeur.eu/f/2ca (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)