Preparing for Future Risks and Climate Crisis: Time for Audit to Take a Long-term View
Background and objectives
Background
a) Long-term thinking is key to tackle future risks, such as climate crisis
Sustainability aspects of public governance and policy-making have gained importance over the past decades. A key element ofsustainability islong-term thinking. With foresight and long-term approaches, we could prepare and build resilience to tackle future risks. Currently we are struggling with the Covid-19 crisis, but in the future climate change could trigger similar crises.
b) In order to prepare for climate change risk, the recovery packages should support carbon neutrality
The financial support and shifts in the economy as a reaction to the current crisis are set to be large, unique and hence represent the biggest opportunity to move the economy towards netzero. The Covid19-crisis has shown how important resilience and preparedness is. Many of the financial packages that both the EU and national governments are releasing to recover from the Covid19 crisis aim to support a shift towards low-carbon. For example, the EU recovery package considers the green and digital transitions even more important now than before the crisis started. Whether fast recovery measures help addressing long-term risks will be one key question.
c) SAIs should develop methodologies to assess future risks and to audit recovery package plans
SAIs could audit directly the resilience and preparedness of governments to cope with long-term risks, in particular the climate crisis. Moreover, SAIs could consider whether the audit methodology and the ways to choose audit topics are equipped to recognize and analyse such long-term risks. SAIs could also use new and emerging methodology such as foresight methods to support their audit work.
A new EUROSAI Project Group to work on sustainability in long-term policy planning and public finances could focus on climate change, as one of the biggest risks. The cooperation could include:
- Methodology cooperation answering the question how to design and carry out audits that assess future risks and integrate long-term thinking, especially in the field of climate. Another concern could be policy coherence issues, for example contradictory spending or incentives offsetting the climate investments.
- Exchange of information and audit development on sustainability in long-term management of societal risks.
- Comparable/Similar audit integrating long-term risks and methodology developed in the first part of the work.
Objectives
The objectives for this project group are:
1. Methodological development among EUROSAI members related to
a) future thinking and foresight, auditing future risks, such as climate crisis;
b) Climate mainstreaming in spending, climate proofing and tracking methods: assessment of whether spending contributes to achieving climate objectives and whether reporting on climate action is reliable.
2. Facilitating sharing of audit approaches and experiences on above mentioned topics;
3. Providing a platform for comparable/similar audit(s) on the topic;
4. Conducting a compilation of lessons learned.
Contact
michele.zagordo@eca.europa.euDocumentation
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