The EU Social Climate Fund is a primary instrument to ensure that Europeans are not forced to choose between eating or heating in the winters to come. For this to happen, however, EU policy negotiators will need to commit to a transformative, adequately resourced fund with strong climate and social safeguards.
As EU co-legislators gear up for another round of negotiations on the EU Social Climate Fund, Europe is in the grip of energy price and energy security emergencies. Record-high, fossil-fuelled inflation is severely impacting EU’s households and people. At the same time, Europe faces a climate emergency, as global temperatures keep rising after decades of insufficient climate action.
This is why E3G and 37 climate, social, and industry organisations are calling on decision makers to ensure that the EU SCF enters into force as soon as possible.
In a joint letter, the signatories are also asking for an ambitious EU SCF, topped-up budget with funding from additional sources, including a solidarity contribution from windfall profits.
The main asks include:
- Setting the minimum EU SCF budget at least to the level proposed by the European Commission (€72.2 billion over 8 years).
- Enabling contributions from the auctioning of allowances under the existing ETS to ensure a minimum budget for the EU Social Climate Fund, which could be complemented with additional sources of finance.
- Scaling up the EU SCF budget in line with carbon pricing, ensuring households receive support in proportion to their exposure to the price of carbon.
- Complementing the budget with Member State co-financing.
- Boosting the budget with solidarity contributions from revenue caps on the industries reaping unexpected windfall profits generated by current high energy prices.
In doing this, co-legislators would stand a strong signal that they stand by Europe’s citizens as they seek to address the most pressing challenges.
