Starting Where Change Made the Biggest Difference

When the CEE Climate Policy Frontier project launched in September 2018, Hungary was in the middle of drafting its first National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP). A document that would set the country’s climate direction for the next decade. The project kicked off with a specific focus: transport and buildings. Two sectors that back then fell outside the EU’s Emissions Trading System and had remained almost entirely off Hungary’s policy radar.
The EUKI project trained policy makers. It supported them in translating best practices from other countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to their own context. Their approach was calibrated to political realities in CEE, they drew the climate policy solutions , from Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.¹ The timing coincided with both the NECP drafting and the 2018 update to the National Climate Change Strategy. The work landed where it could actually matter.

When New Ideas Met a Critical Moment

In late 2019, Hungary finalised its Climate Protection Law and its Long-Term Strategy, landmark documents that would define the country’s low-carbon commitments well into the 2050s. The project Capacity Building for Ambitious Long-Term Strategies arrived at precisely this moment. For the first time, it developed evaluation methods for national long-term strategies in Hungary. This gave independent climate experts concrete tools to identify weaknesses and propose improvements before the European Commission’s official assessment of Hungary’s strategy. The project worked hand in hand with civil society, in particular Friends of the Earth Hungary., Together, they built independent analytical capacity that did not exist before.

At the same time, the project CACTUS made a conceptual intervention that was harder to see but just as significant. Analysts from négaWatt, REKK in Hungary, and the Lithuanian Energy Institute examined the potential for energy sufficiency in Hungary’s transport and building sectors. Sufficiency means reducing demand rather than supplying more clean energy.. In a country where climate policy highly focused on energy supply, the finding that demand-side approaches could be meaningfully integrated into national strategies, was a genuine shift. Hungarian policy makers became increasingly open to sufficiency-related thinking.  The project planted a seed that continues to grow.

Three Projects, Three Climate Challenges, One Shared Goal

Between 2021 and 2023, three EUKI projects ran concurrently in Hungary. Each targeting a different leverage point: the revision of the NECP, the allocation of EU funds, and the politics of carbon pricing. The Green Deal CEE project focused on the NECP revision. In Hungary, more than 60 key actors — NGOs, researchers, sectoral representatives — took part in dialogues the project organised. The impact was clear: the Hungarian government organised several NGO consultations it had not originally planned. It extended public feedback deadlines for the revision. A closed process became measurably more inclusive.

. The project Directing EU Funds towards Climate Neutrality analysed Hungary’s draft REPowerEU chapter. They found that it included projects that would have led to a significant increase in GHG emissions, including the development of oil refineries. The project prevented a climate-damaging investment.. A direct line between project analysis and policy change.

The third project, Distributing the Impacts of Carbon Pricing in CEE, tackled a politically sensitive question. Hungary had opposed ambitious EU carbon pricing. One reason was the concern that higher carbon costs would disproportionately affect lower-income households. For the first time, the project developed a quantitative model to analyse exactly how CO₂ pricing affects different social groups in Hungary. It provided evidence for making carbon pricing socially just. The project achieved to centred the discussion to the key goal: a socially just transition.

Taking Climate Governance to the Local Level

National policy is only part of the story. Local authorities  largely lacked tools, resources or strategies to act. The project Ready4NetZero shifted the focus significantly. From 2022 to 2025 the project team orked with small and medium-sized Hungarian cities alongside partners in Croatia, Poland and Romania. It enabled municipalities to develop and early implement local climate neutrality strategies. Concrete actions kick-started in eight pilot cities. The Hungarian partner was Energiaklub, one of the country’s leading independent climate policy organisations. Energiaklub anchored the work with its strong local roots and ensured continuity beyond the project’s formal end.

Hungary’s climate policy journey is far from complete. But the record of these seven years shows something important. Well-targeted support from civil society, grounded in local realities, can open processes, shift framings and, occasionally, remove oil refineries from national spending plans. The gaps are still there. But so, too, is the ability to fill them.

¹ Study: Good Climate Policy Practices within Transport and Buildings Sectors in the CEE Region – EUKI