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The Ukraine Facility and the Reform and Growth Facility for the Western Balkans regulations: green highlights

The Ukraine Facility Regulation establishes that ‘activities under the Facility shall comply, to the extent possible in a war-torn country, with the climate and environmental standards of the EU’; that ‘those activities shall mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation, environmental protection and biodiversity conservation’; and that the activities ‘shall, to the extent possible, avoid stranded assets, be compatible with the ‘‘do no harm’’ principle, as well as with the sustainability mainstreaming approach underpinning the European Green Deal’ (Art. 4.4). The DNSH principle is referred to in Recital 30.

Moreover, the Facility shall not support activities or measures incompatible with Ukraine’s national energy and climate plan, or with Ukraine’s NDC under the Paris Agreement, which pro- mote investments in fossil fuels or cause significant adverse effects on the environment or the climate or biodiversity. Such activities may only be exempt from this requirement if they are ‘strictly necessary to achieve the objectives of the Facility, taking into account the need to rebuild and modernise infrastructure and rehabilitate natural environment damaged by the war in a resilient way, and are accompanied, where relevant, by appropriate measures to avoid, prevent or reduce and, if possible, offset those adverse effects’. (Art. 4.5).

The Ukraine Plan under the Ukraine Facility’s Pillar 1 is expected to apply a more stringent level of mainstreaming, applying the DNSH principle ‘to the extent possible in a context of war or post-war recovery and reconstruction’.

The general principles under the ‛Reform and Growth Facility for the Western Balkans’ Regulation establish that activities under the Facility shall mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity and environmental protection; they should avoid stranded assets and be guided by the DNSH principle, as well as by the sustainability mainstreaming approach under- pinning the European Green Deal (Art. 4.5). In addition, the Facility shall not support activities or measures that are incompatible with the beneficiaries’ national energy and climate plans, their NDC and ambition to reach climate-neutrality by 2050, or that promote investments in fossil fuels, or that cause significant adverse effects on the environment or the climate (Art. 4.7).