Deal for EU seven-year budget: how to best allocate top up Horizon Europe

The European Parliament. the European Commission’s and EU Council’s negotiating teams finally agreed yesterday on the Multiannual Financial Framework of 2021-27. This is an important step to ensure that there will be no gap in European funding when the current multiannual financial framework ends in January 2021.

We welcome the great effort of the European Parliament, which has long stood for an appropriate EU research and innovation budget for the next seven years. This perseverance led to an increase of 4bn+ Euros for Horizon Europe from the deal reached in July by European leaders.

A greater investment remains nevertheless needed to address the current and future challenges of Europe.The result of this long-awaited agreement comes with very harsh consequence as the lowered budget for Horizon Europe questions the implementation of key priorities of the European Commission such as Green Deal, Climate Change and Health security.

In particular, the pandemic showed us how important it is to rely on a solid basis of frontier research to tackle the huge challenges we are collectively facing. Obviously, the current agreement does not mirror this fact.

By consequence, in the upcoming steps it is now even more crucial to make the appropriate decisions when allocating funds within Horizon Europe namely to reinforce frontier research through European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions.

We remain committed to participate to constructive dialogue with all stakeholders involved and ready to do our part as research and innovation community.