In this report, Eunomia and partners evaluate of the effectiveness of environmental taxes in the management of natural resources and the reduction of pollution.
The report analyses 40 case studies covering a range of topics, including air pollution, water stress, waste, resources and circular economy, water quality, marine litter, biodiversity and land use. The report takes a particular look at how civil society organisations such as think tanks, NGOs and academia contribute to environmental tax reform, and considers how their roles can be utilised to improve effectiveness.
The report also provides recommendations of key design features that have proved to be successful, including;
- specific, well targeted tax bases;
- the introduction of instruments as part of a wider reform package;
- visible environmental earmarking of revenues; and
- sound evaluation and subsequent revision of instruments.
The use of environmental taxes and charges has grown over the past two decades, and there are already a large number of instruments in place across European countries. The results of the study show that the further development of these instruments should include the correcting economic signals, ensuring that civil society organisations are afforded wider opportunities to engage at implementation stages, and that policy and decision makers engage more with civil society.
Supporting documents including an executive summary, presentations from the final conference for the study, held in Brussels on 5 October 2017, together with a summary of discussions on the day, and the suite of 40 case studies are available at the relevant links.
