Climate risks, EU funds for South-East Europe

Thanks to cohesion funds, the EU states of south-eastern Europe are implementing many projects to prevent or combat floods, fires and other risks related to the climate crisis. Namely, the commitment by Greece and Cyprus stands out

Between 2021 and 2027, the EU countries of south-eastern Europe plan to invest at least 2.9 billion of cohesion funds – mostly provided by the European Union – in the prevention of climate risks. These are environmental risks directly linked to climate change, such as fires favoured by increasing heat and drought, or floods caused by particularly intense rainfall.

If we look at the priorities identified by the governments of the EU countries of south-eastern Europe in distributing the cohesion funds at their disposal for the 2021-2027 cycle, we find  1.5 billion specifically earmarked for the prevention and management of hydraulic climate risks and 796 million for the prevention and management of fires linked to the climate crisis.

In addition to these funds, there are those allocated by the Interreg programmes that affect the countries of the region – i.e. cohesion policy programmes that cover more than one country, which plan to mobilise an additional 455 million against climate risks.

On average, South-East European countries have chosen to invest 0.9% of their cohesion policy budget in this area. However, the differences are quite marked: they range from 1.3-1.5% in Greece and Cyprus to 0.9-1% in Croatia and Slovenia, up to just 0.3-0.4% in Romania and Bulgaria. This means that a country like Greece is spending against climate risks, in proportion, more than three times the cohesion funds that Bulgaria invests and more than four times those that Romania invests.

With almost 1.5 billion Euros of planned investments, Greece is also first in the region in absolute terms. Overall, between 2021 and 2027, Greece plans to focus 704 million Euros of cohesion funds on the prevention of floods and hydrogeological instability, and another 421 million Euros on fighting fires.

In relative terms, Cyprus and Slovenia have also chosen to invest a lot of European resources in flood prevention, while, besides Greece, almost only Croatia and Bulgaria are concentrating a significant part of their cohesion funds on fire prevention.

Romania is using a very limited part of its cohesion funds in the prevention of climate risks: the interventions it is carrying out in the environmental field concern rather the construction or modernisation of water networks and waste and wastewater treatment plants, and in some cases the conservation or remediation of natural areas.

There is one exception, however: the Romanian state is investing a large amount of cohesion funds – the equivalent of half a billion euros – in a set of works that should combat one of the manifestations of the climate crisis, namely coastal erosion in the county of Constanta on the Black Sea.

Greek projects against fires and floods

These numbers tell only part of the story. It is indeed possible that other cohesion funds also contribute to combating climate risks: this applies to all funds that finance other types of interventions that can incidentally help achieve this environmental objective.

On the other hand, there is notoriously a large difference between the cohesion funds that different countries plan on spending – and the ways in which they plan to do so – and the funds that they actually manage to use: it is likely that at least part of the resources earmarked for combating climate risks will not actually be spent.

Looking more specifically at the calls for tenders and individual projects that have been approved so far by the authorities that manage Greece's cohesion programmes – both national and regional, we can find a few dozen projects linked to climate risks, for a total value of 1.2 billion Euros.

Of these, 45% concern combating fires. They are almost all projects focused on the purchase of aircraft, drones, trucks or other equipment for firefighters. Between 2014 and 2024, almost five thousand square kilometres of land burned in Greece – an area comparable to half of the Marche region. After Portugal, this is the highest percentage of burned land in Europe.

About 40% of the resources approved so far go towards flood prevention and/or coastal erosion control. Over the past ten years, this type of phenomenon has caused the death of 87 people in Greece, most recently the victims of the massive floods of September 2023 in Thessaly and central Greece.

Among the projects currently underway, for example, one aims to intervene in the mountain areas of Thessaly to contain the flow of watercourses in the event of heavy rains, while others finance the repair of the damage caused by the 2023 flood and new prevention works in some municipalities of Euboea.

Greece’s “Environment and Climate Action”  programme has so far allocated 380 million Euros for flood prevention, with additional funds coming from programmes managed by individual regions of the country. This is just over 10% of the overall budget available for the programme, which also covers many projects for the energy transition and for improving water networks and waste management.

This material is published in the context of the project "Cohesion4Climate" co-funded by the European Union. The EU is in no way responsible for the information or views expressed within the framework of the project; the sole responsibility for the content lies with OBCT.