Current situation
The campaign for the promotion of EFR started in September 2001. We have published several campaign documents and will be organising further seminars on environmental subsidy reform.
Take action now!
You can join our campaign via the national EEB member of your country involved in the campaign. Almost twenty EEB members have joined the campaign!
(for more information on participating organisations, please contact the EEB - see contact below)
What is the EEB doing?
The EEB is lobbying the EU institutions for EFR, and for environmental economic instruments such as emission trading. We do lobbying for the energy taxation directive, the diesel tax directive and we follow other legislative developments that have a link with environmental taxation such as VAT and Integrated Product Policy. We also follow EU initiatives in terms of environmentally harmful subsidies.
We present our campaign at conferences throughout Europe. We also meet other stakeholders in order to discuss EFR topics.
We have an EFR European Working Group that meets to work together on European and national actions. We organise workshops and seminars. The last two seminars were in Brussels on 20 June 2003 (EFR and economic competitiveness) and in Prague on 21 November (Environmentally harmful subsidies).
In the campaign for the promotion of EFR that the EEB started in September 2001, we defined Environmental Fiscal Reform as a tax shift from labour towards environmental use, supplemented by the reform or removal of environmentally adverse subsidies. Environmental taxes are an efficient instrument for fostering a more rational use of natural resources and for reducing pollution. It is also a good incentive for technological innovation. With EFR, ecotaxes can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way: their revenue is recycled towards a cut in other taxes, for instance on labour. Suppressing environmentally harmful subsidies is also an efficient measure for both the environment and the economy. EFR is one of the main tools for moving towards sustainable development, through the internalisation of external costs and getting the prices right for the environment.
Many EU Member States have already started implementing EFR. However, some countries are advanced while others have not done any fiscal reform. And there has been little progress at EU level since 1992, when the European Commission issued its first energy/CO 2 taxation directive proposal. The lack of significant minimum harmonisation within the single market encourages the formation of different national systems and hinders progress in all countries. It took the Economy and Finance Council of Ministers (ECOFIN) six years to finally agree, on 20 March 2003, on the 1997 energy taxation directive. However, the final text considerably watered down the original proposition. Although it was important to agree on new minimum EU tax rates on energy products before the enlargement, this tax increase was merely a long overdue inflation update of the 1992 rates, and there was not much left in the 2003 agreement in terms of real incentives for environment protection.
The EU is increasingly committed to sustainable development. But many countries have already overshot their Kyoto greenhouse gases emission targets. Pollution is still increasing, particularly in the 'Cohesion' and Accession Countries. Natural resources are not used in a rational way. We believe it is time to take concrete action and to put pressure on decision-makers so that fiscal systems are reformed in the direction of sustainability. This can be done at national level, and also encouraged at EU level. One of our main demands is a tax shift from labour towards the use of natural resources. This can even help in fostering employment too!
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