This is an article from ENAC, the Spanish national accreditation body and EA Member.

According to European regulations the projects or reforms to be funded within the framework of the European Recovery and Resilience Facility, the centerpiece of NextGeneration EU funds, must comply with the principle ‘do not cause significant harm’ to the environment (DNSH) contained in Regulation (EU) 2020/852.

For this purpose, aid applicants must carry out a self-assessment of compliance with this principle to demonstrate to the granting authority such compliance.

In this regard, the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism requires that such self-assessment be accompanied by an external validation opinion, confirming the conclusions of the self-assessment and ensuring that they have a sound technical basis, are reasonable and are sufficiently and appropriately justified. To be reliable, these validations must be carried out by organizations having the appropriate independence and technical competence so that the administration can have confidence in the result of their work, and for that reason the Ministry accepts only accredited validation.

To respond to this need, ENAC (the Spanish national accreditation body) developed, in coordination with the Ministry, a specific accreditation scheme based on the international standard, EN ISO/IEC 17029:2019, which establishes the requirements for verification and validation bodies, and the ISO/IEC 14065:2020 standard, which establishes the requirements for environmental information verification and validation bodies and recently the first accreditations have been granted to European Quality Assurance Spain (EQA) and Agencia de Certificación Española (ACIE).

This is another example of how accreditation, once again, proves to be a very useful tool to support public policies as, requiring accredited validation, administrations significantly reduce the risks associated with the reliability of validators, since they know that being accredited, they operate according to international standards and under the monitoring of ENAC.

Click here (Spanish version) or here (English version) to read the article on ENAC’s website.