The EU could be investing tens of billions of euros each year into activities that damage biodiversity, according to a new report from WWF.
With biodiversity declining at an unprecedented rate around the world, the EU intends to put nature on a “path to recovery” by 2030, in line with global goals.
Finance is a key part of this and the bloc has pledged to raise at least €20bn in nature funding each year by the end of the decade.
However, a new report estimates that EU countries could be spending between €34-48bn each year on projects that can end up damaging biodiversity in sectors such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
It is “pretty shocking” to see the potential scale of funding that EU countries are “pouring into harmful practices”, the lead author of the report tells Carbon Brief.
A policy expert, who was not involved in the report, says the findings may increase pressure on the EU to track its harmful subsidies, but criticised some of what the report counted as ‘“harmful”.
Tackling harmful subsidies
There is no standard definition for “biodiversity-harmful subsidies”, but, essentially, they are government incentives that supplement income or lower costs for certain activities that end up damaging biodiversity.
Agriculture, fishery and energy subsidies are most commonly termed “harmful”, but damage can also be caused by subsidies for other sectors, including forestry, infrastructure, transport, construction and water.
Subsidies that harm nature and the environment cost the world around $1.8tn each year, according to a 2022 report from two coalition industry groups – equivalent to the entire GDP of Canada.
There are a number of global goals in place to reduce these harmful subsidies.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the global deal for nature signed at the UN COP15 biodiversity summit in 2022, includes a target to cut biodiversity-harming incentives, including subsidies, by at least $500bn per year by 2030. The target also aims to identify such incentives by 2025, although the EU has so far not done so.
The new analysis finds that the EU is allocating between €34-48bn every year to subsidise activities that harm biodiversity. The table below shows the upper and lower estimates for each sector examined.
| Sector | Lower estimate of biodiversity harmful subsidies (€) | Upper estimate of biodiversity harmful subsidies (€) |
|---|---|---|
| Agriculture and forestry | 31.35bn | 32.57bn |
| Fisheries | 60m | 140m |
| Transport infrastructure | 1.69bn | 14.07bn |
| Water | 1.33bn | 2.09bn |
| Total | 34.43bn | 48.87bn |
This largest proportion of funding comes from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU’s farming-subsidy programme, which accounts for almost one-third of the bloc’s total budget. (See “agricultural impact” below.)
The subsidies include funds that support “unsustainable” farming, land-use changes, river fragmentation and deforestation, according to the report. It adds that these activities can have knock-on effects on biodiversity, including habitat loss, ecosystem degradation and species extinction.
Prof Alan Matthews, a European agricultural policy expert at Trinity College Dublin, says the findings start a “good debate” about measuring these subsidies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I see the report as contributing to the pressure on the EU…to actually come up with its own identification of what the subsidies are, so that they can begin then in the next few years to actually reduce them.”
Direct links
The study, conducted by the Netherlands-based economics consultancy Trinomics for WWF, looks at the biodiversity-harming elements of the EU’s long-term budget, the 2021-27 Multiannual Financial Framework.
It focuses on direct financing for the agricultural, forestry, fishery, transport and water sectors that may be damaging to biodiversity. This financing includes grants, loans and direct payments.
It does not look at indirect subsidies, such as tax breaks, or infrastructure investments that disproportionately benefit certain industries, such as tax reductions on fertilisers.
Tycho Vandermaesen, the policy and strategy director at WWF EU and lead author of the report, says there is an overlap between subsidies that damage biodiversity and those that exacerbate climate change, such as fossil fuel subsidies. But the climate impacts were not examined in the report. He says:
“We have taken a very conscious choice here to only look at biodiversity-harmful subsidies because this is one of the most under-highlighted environmentally harmful subsidies – in contrast to climate or fossil-fuel subsidies, which have by now been well researched.”
Matthews notes that the overall findings of the report are in line with previous research, but he criticises some parts of the methodology, such as including a very wide range of direct payments for farmers, as potentially harmful.
In response, Vandermaesen says the assumption on the harmful nature of direct payments for farmers is based on findings in existing studies.
On Monday, the EU Council approved a targeted review of the CAP to assess, among other things, plans to give farmers “greater flexibility” to comply with environmental terms for their direct payments.
The report is clear that there are uncertainties and a lack of up-to-date information on EU spending in some sectors. It says the findings are estimates and that more comprehensive analysis would be required to fully measure these subsidies.
Agricultural impact
Agriculture and forestry receive the most funding for biodiversity-damaging activities out of any sector examined in the report, as shown in the chart below.
The report notes that several EU funds “allocate money in a way that encourages large-scale unsustainable farming or forestry practices”.
These include direct farmer payments based on farm size, which can incentivise boosting industrial livestock numbers and expanding conventional crop production – “both of which harm the environment”, according to the report.
It estimates that around 60% of CAP funding – meaning more than €30bn each year – can be considered harmful to biodiversity.
The current CAP plan, which took effect in 2023 and will remain until 2027, included more environmental measures than previous iterations of the policy. But critics told Carbon Brief in 2021 that the plan was riddled with “loopholes” and unlikely to bring significant change to the sector.
Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the sector is also a key driver of forest loss, causing 80% of deforestation as forest lands are cleared to make space for livestock, palm oil and soya beans.
Looking at other sectors, the report outlines that 5-12% of the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund – a fishery funding programme – is put towards biodiversity-harmful subsidies.
This is up to 2.5 times higher than the money from this fund aiming to protect and restore biodiversity, the report says.
The report says it is “challenging” to accurately estimate the impact that building transport infrastructure can have on biodiversity, noting that it can fragment habitats and ecosystems. It estimates that the EU spends anywhere between €1.7bn and €14bn each year on roads, railways and other transport infrastructure that could be harmful to biodiversity.
Funds used for certain water infrastructure, such as flood control dams, could also harm biodiversity, the research notes.
Making changes
The report contains a number of recommendations to put an end to these subsidies, including implementing a legally binding framework to phase out biodiversity-harmful subsidies on both EU and national levels. It adds:
“Inclusiveness and social awareness need to be included in the phase-out of biodiversity-harmful subsidies to avoid regions or industries being left behind or struggling with the transition.”
Vandermaesen says that consulting with the impacted sectors and giving a clear pathway to diverting these subsidies is a “really important” step. He adds:
“We do not want to see a situation where, from one day to the next, these subsidies are basically stopped without the involvement of these communities.”
The report recommends diverting the funding instead for public investments to protect and restore ecosystems and to put in place “ambitious” national biodiversity plans ahead of the COP16 biodiversity summit, which is scheduled to be hosted by Colombia later this year.
WWF recently asked European political parties whether they would commit to redirecting fossil fuel and other environmentally harmful subsidies towards the “green transition”. All parties that responded expressed a readiness to redirect these subsidies, but the NGO says that “only a few have committed to enshrining this redirection into law”.
The subsidies report includes a number of case studies of nature-harming subsidies across Europe.
A forest recovery plan in France, financed partly by the EU, has had “adverse effects” on forests, the report outlines. Almost nine out of 10 projects financed by the plan in 2021 and 2022 involved clearcutting of trees, which can weaken ecosystems.
The report details another example in Bulgaria, where farmers were permitted to let animals graze in areas of the country’s national parks to help preserve open areas.
This led to “vegetation being trampled, water being polluted and wildlife being disturbed”, the report says. To mitigate these effects, park administrations requested €760,000 from the country’s EU-funded environment programme.
These examples “illustrate how complex it can be actually on the ground to deliver these positive results”, Matthews says, adding:
“In quite a number of the case studies, actually the subsidies were intended to be positive for biodiversity. But it seems that the way they were implemented…They had these sort of perverse outcomes.”
The post EU spending up to €48bn on nature-harming activities each year, report says appeared first on Carbon Brief.
EU spending up to €48bn on nature-harming activities each year, report says
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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