Access to climate funding: how do European States stimulate a just and low-carbon transition at local level?

Climate Chance and the Caisse des Dépôts organise a virtual workshop to explore how European local governments can access climate fundings to lead a just transition in a context of economic recovery.

In December 2020, the Council of the European Union agreed on a Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) of €1074 billion for the period 2021-2027, with the ecological transition at the heart of its roadmap, the European Green Deal. Combined with the €750 billion recovery plan (Next Generation EU) to bounce back from the Covid-19 crisis, never before has so much public money been made directly available to shift our societies to a low-carbon model.

For now, Member States are working on submitting their Recovery and Resilience Plans to the European Commission as a condition for receiving Next Generation EU funds. However, neither the European Commission’s guidelines for designing these plans nor the European Council decision of 21 July 2020 really rely on local governments to steer the recovery, as Climate Chance pointed out in a note last August. For its part, the 2021-2027 MFF enshrines the principles of integration, specialisation and generalisation of the alignment of public spending with the Paris Agreement and its climate objectives across all structural funds.

Based on the observation that little mention is made of local governments and territories in the recovery plans, the Climate Chance Observatory proposes to gather a panel of European experts to discuss two questions:

• How do other Member States organise the ecological transition on the territories and what are the obstacles they encounter?
• What tools are available to local governments to facilitate the financing of their climate projects?