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A climate council should marry policies with ambition

European Union climate policies need to become more ambitious as the bloc looks to hit its net-zero emissions goal for 2050. But a gap between what is agreed on paper and deployed in the real world means a risk of having to do more than one energy transition. Lawmakers are setting up an EU-wide advisory board to bridge that void

NATIONAL LESSONS
Similar climate committees are having a growing impact on national governments decarbonisation pathways

COMPLEX ISSUES
A scientific advisory board will be able to understand the complex environmental policies and fine-tune them

KEY QUOTE
The policies to reach the short-run targets should be designed with the long-run ambition in mind Lawmakers within the European Union have signed off on a new climate law; a bumper package of rules that will set an emissions-cutting target for 2030, plot a course towards a 2040 benchmark and legalise the 2050 net-zero goal.

Talks between the European Commission, Council and Parliament dragged on due to fights over the headline emissions targets, as well as the nitty-gritty detail that will underpin the law but finally wrapped up in late April. Members of the European Parliament wanted the proposed 55% emissions cut for 2030 to increase to 60%—which ultimately did not materialise—and a carbon budget to be drawn up. They also called for an independent committee to keep tabs on the bloc’s progress. The European Climate Change Council (ECCC)—also known as the “European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change” in the EU text— will track EU climate policies and compare them to overall targets and commitments made under the Paris Agreement. It will issue regular recommendations and reports, similar to how national advisory bodies work such as the Committee on Climate Change in the UK and The Danish Council on Climate Change. This idea is contentious as the Commission initially claimed that there was no need for extra oversight. Senior officials involved in the behind-closed-doors talks told FORESIGHT Climate & Energy before the agreement was struck that their institution already has the technical and political influence to set climate policies effectively. The Council, meanwhile, was only willing to set up a network of representatives, who would be beholden to political priorities. However, the final deal includes a plan for a 15-person body of scientific experts, with a maximum of two per EU country, who will serve a mandate of four years. Green lawmakers, disappointed with the overall emissions target that was brokered, called that detail “a silver lining” of the agreement. MEPs had insisted that the ECCC would not double up on work already done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the EU Environment Agency, and would reinforce the Commission’s policy-making powers.

CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM

Michael Bloss, a lawmaker with the Greens group and part of the Parliament’s negotiating team, said that the Commission “did not voice these concerns when national bodies—which have been successful in the member states and the UK—were established.” “To achieve the emissions cuts, we need a climate council that gives advice on how much equitable carbon budget we have left and which makes sure that the policies that we are implementing are having the desired climate impact,” he added. WWF Europe, an NGO, also welcomed that aspect of the climate law deal. Romain Laugier, a policy expert with the organisation, insisted that “the European Environment Agency must now ensure that the body remains politically independent and that its members are appointed only on the basis of their merits.” Members will be selected through the EEA’s management board. The ECCC idea is not the only attempt to set up a fully independent climate policy authority, as lawmakers are currently reviewing the EU’s energy infrastructure regulation, the TEN-E. Some MEPs and environmental groups want to establish a new body tasked with deciding which energy projects should be funded, cutting completely what they believe is excessive influence by the energy industry. Claude Turmes, a former MEP and now Luxembourg’s energy minister, struck a cautious tone when asked if this was the right course of action, suggesting that it would take a long time to set up and it would be difficult to decide who should be in charge of it. Turmes’ stand reflects a wider view among national governments that there might already be enough EU institutional bureaucracy to run climate policies successfully and that the real work should be focused on fine-tuning the existing framework.

WIDER SUPPORT

Support for the ECCC plan, which will now have to be fully fleshed out, goes beyond the hallways of the European Parliament. A group of scientists and experts from various national advisory bodies around Europe urged EU leaders to support the idea. In a letter dated March 2021, they explain an ECCC “should be enabled to give recommendations independent of political and sectoral interests on how best to create policies with a holistic perspective and focus on cost-efficiency, while at the same time taking into account public financial constraints as well as competitiveness and the ‘just transition’ perspective.” The experts also say the council would “ensure better consistency between EU and national policies” and “identify and analyse the potentials for sector coupling and give recommendations on how best to integrate systems thinking”. Recently, the European Commission has faced accusations—particularly from MEPs—that it only proposes what is politically expedient, rather than what is scientifically required. It is hoped that the ECCC will help plug that gap. Peter Møllgaard, the head of Denmark’s climate council and a signatory of the March letter, also believes that an ECCC will fulfil a crucial bridging role between the EU’s short-term targets and the 2050 net-zero goal, making it more likely to hit the mid-century objective. “One of the key advantages would be that you have an organisation that will connect short-run targets with the long-run ambition; the policies to reach the short-run targets should be designed with the long-run ambition in mind,” Møllgaard explains. “You risk having to do the transition more than once if you choose policies that help reach the 2030 target but cannot bring us to climate neutrality,” he warns, adding that coherence between targets also reduces the risk of creating stranded assets. Møllgaard also insists that an EU-level council could help Brussels factor in the societal costs and benefits of climate policies, a metric that is notably lacking from much of the Commission’s green number-crunching. “The Danish CCC plays a similar role: one example is that we take the overall cost effectiveness of climate policy into account independent of specific interests,” he explains. From 2020, the Danish council also assesses factors like social balance, carbon leakage and labour market effects.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

What the ECCC would do is one matter. Who would sit on it is another. Møllgaard and his fellow national advisors say that they are available to help advise. Others warn against letting national governments just appoint their own representatives. Elisa Giannelli, with climate think tank E3G, warned before the Climate Law deal was struck that if a toothless “network of stakeholders or national representatives” is set up “then we are not only creating another layer of bureaucracy but perhaps even running the risk of sending a regressive signal”. Giannelli added that an ECCC is an opportunity for the EU to prepare for the future and present challenges of the energy transition and even for unexpected events; such as the lessons learned from the pandemic. It might also be a boon to democracy, boosting community energy projects. Adrian Hiel, policy expert at Energy Cities, a European-wide association of local authorities, says if the composition is right, improved credibility could let the EU “take ever bolder steps” in climate policies. Hiel suggests that an EU-level body could be modelled after France’s Citizens Convention for Climate, involving mayors of different sized cities, which could effectively bridge the gap between energy transition policies and implementation. “Many politicians can be understandably concerned about taking action that might be too ambitious and too disruptive and the backlash that might ensue. A convention of mayors provides the political cover to be bolder and more decisive,” he insists.

MOVING PARTS

The Commission and national governments should accept all the help it can get due to the sheer complexity of the energy transition, according to Simone Tagliapietra, from Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. “Establishing an ECCC would be a positive step. Climate policies will be increasingly complex as we move forward, and having an independent body to monitor and impartially evaluate them would be important to fine-tune the decarbonisation process as it moves forward,” he explains. Tagliapietra and other academics previously urged the current Commission to set up a European Energy Agency for many of the same reasons given in favour of setting up an ECCC. A 2019 note to Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans, insists that “given the limits in your competences, you must build on the soft power of transparent and convincing analysis in order to coordinate national energy and climate policies meaningfully.” It adds that the Commission can only set policies by relying on large-scale models, rather than taking into account “observable indicators and detailed data” and that the work it outsources suffers from “costly duplication, inconsistency, lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest”. Tagliapietra cites the UK’s CCC as a successful example of where an advisory body has had a substantial impact on government-level policy-making, and he is not alone in holding it up as a well-functioning model of good governance. Dr Simon Evans, a UK-based energy analyst, says that the UK’s CCC’s work helping to set carbon budgets and its net-zero target has been very influential, as have its recommendations on specific policies. “Would the UK have had the same targets without an independent body recommending them? It’s hard to answer that but, to be honest, it feels unlikely,” Dr Evans suggests, citing a disagreement over the fifth carbon budget between the UK’s energy ministry and the Treasury where the CCC’s intervention proved to be decisive. Dr Evans, however, did question whether the CCC model could be applied to the EU, repeating concerns that it could end up duplicating work that the Commission already does. The UK’s CCC recently advised the government against using international emissions credits instead of making actual domestic emission cuts and at the end of 2020 published its recommendations for the UK’s sixth carbon budget. Helping to manage a carbon budget, which will be drawn up for the first time for 2030-2050 by the Commission, is one of the primary tasks envisaged for the ECCC. Outside of the negotiating room, the notion of setting up a meaningful link between the Brussels policy-making bubble and the ‘real world’ has plenty of advocates. It has the potential to democratise the energy transition further and, as a result, accelerate and strengthen it. The challenge now will be to add detail and substance to the plan.

TEXT Sam Morgan