ApC will manage all national and international climate funds in Portugal
Portugal’s minister for the environment and energy has presented in detail the new Climate Agency (ApC), which will manage all national and international climate funds and will have a president appointed by the minister.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the minister explained in more detail what the ApC – whose creation was announced at the beginning of October in Entroncamento, Santarém – will be.
The ApC’s main functions, said the minister, will be to lead, propose and implement policies in the area of the environment, mitigate and adapt the country to climate change, and coordinate decarbonisation in the sectors of industry, buildings, transport, agriculture and forestry policies.
As well as supporting the formulation and implementation of public climate action policies, the ApC will also be responsible for developing and monitoring the National Energy and Climate Plan (PNEC2030).
It will also carry out the functions of the National Authority for the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which was under the responsibility of the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), and will supervise the voluntary carbon markets.
Maria da Graça Carvalho explained that the new agency will bring together various services that until now depended on the general secretariat of the ministry for the environment, and said that it will be financed through a percentage of the funds it will manage, which is not fixed but should be around 2%.
The Environmental Fund alone manages €1.2 million per year, and the Social Climate Fund will have another €1 billion for several years, which translates to around €200 million per year, plus a further €37 million from the EEAGrants programme, said the minister.
Graça Carvalho also explained that part of the ApC’s staff will come from the general secretariat for the environment, to which will be added around 40 people from the APA (and another nine recruited in the meantime).
“There will be a great deal of interconnection between the ApC and the APA, which continues to have responsibility for water, the environment and waste,” said the minister, also explaining that the ApC’s board of directors is made up of a president, a deputy minister and two members, one of whom is appointed by the minister of finance and the other members by the minister for the environment in conjunction with the ministers for the environment and agriculture.
The new entity will be responsible for managing the country’s international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and will manage funds that were dispersed: the Environmental Fund, the Blue Fund (sea policies), the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), the Social Climate Fund (promoting a just energy transition), the Modernisation Fund (modernising strategic sectors for decarbonisation), the Just Transition Fund (minimising the social impacts of the climate transition) and EEA Grants.
Maria da Graça Carvalho recalled that several funds depended on the ministry’s general secretariat and said that the Social Fund is, for example, linked to thermal comfort.
There will be greater transparency and rigour with the new agency and a “consolidation of climate responsibilities that were dispersed”, as well as strengthening the fight against climate change, she said.
Source: LUSA
