Commission calls for reports on emissions security
Member states asked to submit security reports; more than €30m of allowances were stolen.
National governments have been asked to report to the European Commission on planned security measures to protect the European emissions trading system (ETS), following cyber-fraud amounting to €30 million.
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Criminals targeted the national accounts, known as registries, in Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece and Poland, and transferred around two million allowances worth €30 million. Each member state, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which also take part in the ETS, has its own registry.
All national registries remain closed more than one week after the Commission suspended most transactions on 19 January. The national administrations will send details of security measures over the course of the next week, to be assessed by the Commission, which has promised to give 24 hours’ notice, before allowing a registry to resume normal business. The registries are expected to re-open at different times, as some countries have better security than others.
The fraud is a blow to the credibility of the scheme, launched in 2005 as the nucleus of the EU’s efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
But the Commission has mounted a defence of the ETS. Writing in European Voice this week, Jos Delbeke, the director-general for climate action, says that the system is fulfilling its role. The attacks showed “that the success of the EU’s emissions trading system in putting a price on carbon and developing a liquid market makes it an attractive target for crime”.
Delbeke describes the security issue as a temporary one, because from next year the Commission will operate a single central registry.
Greater control
For the European Parliament, the fraud reinforces the case for more control by the Commission and less by member states. Jo Leinen, a German Socialist MEP who chairs the Parliament’s environment committee, said: “A lot of damage has been done by those thefts. Trust and confidence in this system have been undermined. It is high time to get a European trading system and to get rid of the 27 different systems that we have today.”
Critics of the ETS say that the fraud is just one more failure of the ETS. David Heller, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “Large-scale fraud of this kind shows the risks that the EU is taking by relying on a market-based response to the climate crisis.
“The European Commission is investing a lot of time and energy trying to prop up a scheme that has failed to achieve any real reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions,” he said.