On 29 October 2026, at its 51st session in Strasbourg, the Congress adopted a recommendation “Towards a healthy environment from the local level up”, stressing the urgent need to draw up a legally binding instrument of the Council of Europe recognising the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The recommendation was presented by Meropi-Spyridoula Ydraiou (Greece, EPP/CCE), Congress Spokesperson on the environment and climate change.
The Congress noted with deep concern that the triple planetary crisis posed by pollution, climate change and the loss of biodiversity was intensifying – 1 in 8 animal and plant species is now threatened with extinction, and sea-level rise is accelerating and could increase by a full meter by 2150. August 2026 was the warmest month ever recorded – in Europe alone, at least 50,000 excess deaths were recorded during the summer 2026 heatwaves. Sea and sea-surface record temperatures were broken and drought-related wildfires devastated communities throughout the continent, including in areas not previously affected by such fires.
The Congress underlined that in the absence of new environmental action, further damage to people’s homes, communities and livelihoods and increased losses of life will continue to erode public authorities’ capacity to uphold human rights standards, and thereby also erode public confidence in those standards and the ability of democratic institutions at all levels to uphold them and to protect their way of life.
The Congress urged political actors and institutions at all levels to do all that they can to reverse the trajectory of environmental harm, and highlighted the central role of sub-national authorities in such action, calling on them to use their powers to protect their local environment.
The recommendations calls on the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers to draw up a draft legally binding instrument on the environment in consultation with the Congress, and to draft an additional protocol to the European Charter of Local Self-Government that would commit member States to raising local and regional authorities’ awareness of their powers and responsibilities to protect the environment.
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