EU Parliament renews LIFE budget

According to the EU Parliament, LIFE is an extremely successful and popular EU funding instrument. For over 20 years it has been leveraging investment in environment and climate projects, including funds for Natura 2000, the EU-wide network of nature protection areas. Therefore MEPs decided to vote to continue and strengthen this programme.

Parliament agreed with EU ministers, that the budget for the LIFE programme in the period 2014-2020 will increase to €3.1 billion, from €2.2 billion currently, to tackle new tasks and challenges, mainly in the climate action and resource efficiency fields. In its negotiations with ministers, Parliament also secured an increased allocation for nature and biodiversity.

In the next LIFE programme, projects will be selected for funding solely on the basis of their quality and demonstration potential – a more transparent method than the current national allocations whereby a share of funds is indicatively attributed to each member state. Instead, capacity-building measures have been introduced to help countries and regions with a low selection rate of projects to achieve higher project quality.

MEPs also negotiated and voted in favour of “integrated projects”, which will allow various EU funds to be invested jointly to tackle the key challenges of applying legislation in water, waste, air quality and nature protection fields. These projects offer an opportunity to build environment and climate policy concerns and solutions into other policies.