Environmental Assessments within Green Budgeting

Environmental assessments are a crucial aspect of green budgeting as they help to understand the impact and effectiveness of government policies in reaching the climate and environmental objectives. They are also useful to better grasp the link between inputs and outputs within the budgetary process. This paper presents an overview of such practices across EU Member States, covering both ex-ante impact assessments and ex-post evaluations. It also demonstrates how other green budgeting tools, such as environmental performance and impact indicators and sovereign green bonds, can help developing environmental assessment methodologies. Overall, only few Member States have incorporated environmental assessments into their regular budgeting cycle, highlighting their extensive resource requirements. Building environmental assessment methodologies on already existing green budgeting tools can ease the process. It also helps ensuring consistency between different green practices and definitions at the national level and avoiding duplication of efforts.