CoR Plenary (June 2022)

Linking national spending on the environment with the effects it has on the environmental performance of EU Member States allows for a better assessment of the effective quality of budgetary interventions. In this analysis, based on the detailed research paper in the Annex, we discuss under what circumstances some public environmental expenditure could be spent more efficiently at EU rather than at national level. We estimate that this transfer towards a more efficient level of governance would allow Member States to save between €20 billion and €26 billion of budgetary spending per year. In the present exacerbated economic, social and environmental crisis, we conclude that reducing budgetary waste and improving the way public money is spent should be fully integrated to achieve more sustainable development.

Offering an overview of the economic and budgetary situation in the EU and beyond, and summarising the main economic indicators in the EU and euro area and their two-year trends, this study is the sixth in an annual series of 'Outlooks' produced by the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS). In seven chapters, the authors of the publication explain and analyse the EU annual budget and give an overview of its headings for 2022, all within the wider budgetary context of the EU’s post-2020 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery fund. This year's special 'economic focus' puts the spotlight on some aspects of the ongoing economic recovery– namely, fiscal and monetary matters, labour issues and environmental choices – and aims to give a flavour of the discussion expected in the coming months.

National budgets are a competence of the national governments of the Member States. However, EU countries adopting the euro have to meet specific conditions designed to ensure economic convergence, known as the convergence criteria or Maastricht criteria (agreed by the Member States in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992). They include conditions on sound and sustainable public finances, along with the macroeconomic indicators - price stability, durability of convergence, and exchange rate stability.

Green bonds are committed to financing or re-financing investments, projects, expenditure or assets helping to address climate and environmental issues. Both governments and companies use them to finance the transition to a more sustainable and low-carbon economy. Since the EIB inaugurated the green bond market in 2007 with its Climate Awareness Bond, the market has grown very fast, but it still represents only about 3 to 3.5 % of overall bond issuance. The green bond market needs to grow more quickly to achieve the targets in the Paris Agreement. The Commission's proposal aims to establish an official EU standard for green bonds aligned with the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities, based on a registration system and supervisory framework for external reviewers of European green bonds.

Urban building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is important for urban planning, population statistics, and disaster assessment. However, the high density and slight boundary differences of urban building regions pose a great challenge for accurate building extraction. Although existing building extraction methods have achieved better results in urban building extraction, there are still some problems, such as boundary information loss, poor extraction effect for dense regions, and serious interference by building shadows.