EU ministers to discuss funding climate change adaptation, water

Ewa Krukowska in Bloomberg: European Union ministers will discuss water management and financing of adaptation to climate change, whose costs to the region are estimated at 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in 2020, at an informal meeting this weekend.

Environment ministers from the bloc’s 27 governments will hold talks on a planned policy paper on safeguarding water resources tomorrow, according to a draft agenda of the meeting hosted by Cyprus.

The second day of the meeting in Nicosia will be devoted to the use of private and EU funds to adjust infrastructure and minimize threats from global warming to human health and ecosystems. The agenda features the presidency priorities in the area of climate change and doesn’t include any discussion on EU carbon-reduction goals beyond 2020 or the bloc’s carbon market after talks on those issues stalled earlier this year.

“The specific characteristics of some adaptation measures, such as their trans-boundary nature, are requiring good coordination across borders, and their reliance on environmental services, by definition difficult to value, make access to finance more difficult,” the Cypriot government wrote in a background paper for the meeting.

“Finding adequate sources of financing is therefore crucial in order to stimulate investments in adaptation action,” according to the document, published on the EU presidency website....

In Vienna, the Danube flooded in 2009, shot by Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license