The present note has been drafted as a background document for the hearing on ‘The EU Budget and the Paris Climate Agreement’ organised by the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety of the European Parliament, on 24 April 2018.
It aims at providing an introduction to the topic, looking at the EU commitments in the field of climate from a budgetary angle. It is based on publicly available information. The first section gives a brief overview of the policy context, in particular the greenhouse gas phenomenon, actions taken at international level, and the EU actions. The second part focuses on budgetary aspects: briefly presents the methodology for estimating the climaterelated expenditure in the EU budget, provides the related figures and their breakdown per budget’s headings, programmes and, tentatively, mitigation and adaptation activities. The third section concludes, focusing on main weaknesses of the EU climate action identified by external analysts, in particular the coherence of EU policies in this respect.