The EU Recovery Package presented by the European Commission today has reconfirmed its ambition to achieve the European Green Deal, but many key elements including the role of nature are still missing, and backdoors seem to be left open for unsustainable investments to continue. The package consists of a revised EU budget (MFF) proposal that includes additional recovery funds, with an overall value of 1.85 trillion EUR...

“In particular, we are missing clear mechanisms for implementing and enforcing the green conditions to truly ensure that no money spent by Member States will go to harmful activities such as fossil fuels..."

Since the beginning of the crisis, WWF has stated unequivocally that a truly green recovery must not support activities that are harmful to the environment; ...and that it should use the EU Taxonomy to identify the activities that should be supported...

- [T]he ‘do no harm’ principle ... seems to apply only to public investments in the recovery,  and not the 1.1 trillion EUR of the EU budget, thus leaving the door open to EU financing of polluting sectors...

- The Commission commits to use the taxonomy to guide investments in the EU’s recovery, but only for the recovery funds, not for the MFF. This leaves big questions on how exactly the taxonomy will be applied to MFF expenditure and requires urgent clarification...