The European Commission’s proposal for the future EU budget has been released!

This budget is supposed to be closely linked to the ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’ objectives and priorities – one of them being energy and climate.

President Barroso in his speech at the press conference mentioned at several occasions that energy efficiency and climate are, indeed, one of the main priorities. Moreover, he said that “energy and climate shall be mainstreamed into all policies funded by the EU budget”, which is completely in line with Energy Cities’ opinion on this issue.

Highlights of the new EU budget proposal are:

• European Commission (EC) suggests to increase ‘own resources’ of the EU to finance the EU budget and reduce the contributions of the Member States, based as a percentage of their Gross National Income (currently limited to 1.136% of the GNI). This shall be done through new VAT resource and financial transaction tax.

• Cohesion policy and Common Agricultural policy remain the most important policies of the EU in terms of the budget. Cohesion policy funding will be targeted on a limited number of priorities: competitiveness and transition regions would primarily devote their budgetary allocation, except for the ESF, to energy efficiency, renewable energies, SME, competitiveness and innovation, while convergence regions would devote their allocation to a somewhat wider range of priorities (where necessary, including institutional capacity building).

• New fund – Connecting Europe Facility - shall be created. Worth 50 bn EUR (40 bn EUR + 10 bn EUR from the Cohesion Fund), the fund will finance pan European energy, transport and ICT infrastructure projects.

• More money shall go to education, vocational training, research and innovation and SMEs with the aim to get people to work

Next steps:

• 2011-2012: Member states and European Parliament to discuss and amend Commission’s proposals.
• By end 2012: Deadline for approving EU’s long-term budget for 2014-2020.

Further details of this proposal can be found here.

Want to know more? Read Energy Cities’ article explaining at a glance the EU budget and its contribution to local sustainable energy and transport project.