The international and EU agenda on improving resource efficiency aims at developing an economy that creates and delivers more value with less input, that uses resources more sustainably and that minimises the associated environmental impacts. To this end, phasing out environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) plays an important role. The project's objective is to support the Commission with relevant knowledge and advice on this phasing out.

Despite EU and international commitments and calls to phase out EHS by 2020 (as called for in the Europe 2020 strategy [pdf, 151 kB, English] and in the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe [pdf, 181 kB, English]), progress on the ground has been slow so far, and the size of subsidies worldwide is still significant. For instance, subsidies for agriculture in OECD countries amounted to US$261 billion/year from 2006 to 2008 and worldwide energy-related subsidies were US$557 billion in 2008 (Source: Lehmann M., P. ten Brink, S. Bassi, D. Cooper, A. Kenny, S. Kuppler, A. von Moltke, and S. Withana (2011). Reforming Subsidies. In: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) in National and International Policy Making. An output of TEEB, edited by Patrick ten Brink, IEEP. Earthscan, London).

The present 'Study supporting the phasing out of environmentally harmful subsidies' aims to assist the European Commission in implementing the calls to phase out EHS by 2020.

Ecologic Institute will contribute to the following corresponding objectives of the study:

• Identify and define key types of EHS that merit reform and provide concrete examples of existing EHS in the EU Member States;   
• Present and analyse examples of good practices of EHS reform and the lessons learnt from them;
• Formulate practical recommendations to Member States on phasing out and reforming EHS in line with the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy and the resource efficiency agenda;
• Provide the Commission with ad-hoc advice on technical issues related to EHS reform and phasing out in the context of monitoring and reporting under the Europe 2020 strategy.