{"id":28842,"date":"2026-03-10T08:59:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T08:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/28842\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T08:59:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T08:59:33","slug":"swiss-senate-seeks-bigger-cuts-to-climate-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/28842\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiss Senate seeks bigger cuts to climate protection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/a184477725a5b5bff896dc416dbb634a926e5826-91066917.jpg\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" alt=\"Savings plan: Member States want to cut back more on climate protection\" loading=\"eager\" decoding=\"sync\" fetchpriority=\"high\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter supports a vast savings programme to help federal finances out of the red.            <\/p>\n<p>            Keystone-SDA        <\/p>\n<p>        In ongoing negotiations over the federal savings plan, the Senate has proposed more extensive reductions to environment and regional transport budgets than those backed by the House of Representatives.\n<\/p>\n<p>            Listen to the article        <\/p>\n<p>            Listening the article        <\/p>\n<p>                Toggle language selector            <\/p>\n<p>                            English (US)                        <\/p>\n<p>                            English (British)                        <\/p>\n<p>            Generated with artificial intelligence.        <\/p>\n<p>        This content was published on    <\/p>\n<p>        March 10, 2026 &#8211; 09:23\n<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/latest-news\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n<p>On Monday the Senate proposed reducing funds allocated to the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) by CHF64.7 million. The cut is still only half of what was planned in the government\u2019s 2027-2029 savings package.<\/p>\n<p>The Senate also decided to maintain pressure on regional transport by proposing a cut of \u20ac70 million. The House of Representatives on the other hand voted to spare this budget line.<\/p>\n<p>Parliamentarians also refused to invest more in continuing education. The Senate declined to increase the budget by CHF28.6 million. But it spared the medicine branch.<\/p>\n<p>\n    More<\/p>\n<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/e6715d611e5f2a3d4d0cfbae5002954cb6ab6168-90033301.jpg\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" alt=\"The Federal Council wants to save 2.4 billion by 2027\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" fetchpriority=\"auto\"\/><\/p>\n<p>        More    <\/p>\n<p>        Swiss government wants to save CHF2.4 billion in 2027    <\/p>\n<p class=\"teaser-wide-card__excerpt\">\n<p>                        This content was published on                    <\/p>\n<p>                        Sep 19, 2025                    <\/p>\n<p>                The Confederation will have to save CHF 2.4 billion in 2027 and CHF 3 billion in 2028 and 2029. The Federal Council submitted its proposal to Parliament on Friday. The Council of States will consider it in the winter session, and the National Council in the spring.            <\/p>\n<p>    <a class=\"teaser-wide-card__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/various\/the-federal-council-wants-to-save-2-4-billion-by-2027\/90033316\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><\/p>\n<p>            Read more: Swiss government wants to save CHF2.4 billion in 2027<br \/>\n    <\/a><\/p>\n<p>Agreement on victim support<\/p>\n<p>The Senate meanwhile accepted other changes decided by the House of Representatives. For example, parliamentarians agreed to save the budget earmarked for training staff working with victims of violence.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/swiss-politics\/the-swiss-welfare-state-is-not-about-to-be-dismantled\/89487879\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">+ The Swiss welfare state is \u2018not about to be dismantled\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The government\u2019s sweeping austerity plan calls for major cuts across most sectors to avert a projected budget shortfall in the coming years. The Federal Council is proposing total savings package of CHF8.5 billion over three years. The Senate reduced this amount to CHF5.5 billion in December. Last week the House of Representatives lowered it further to \u20ac5.1 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Further talks will now take place in the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n<p>\n    More<\/p>\n<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/f980568b13613785aeb571e7673ebdfe-87511095.jpg\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" alt=\"expert committee\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" fetchpriority=\"auto\"\/><\/p>\n<p>        More    <\/p>\n<p>        Swiss Politics\n        <\/p>\n<p>        Swiss finance expert defends austerity measures    <\/p>\n<p class=\"teaser-wide-card__excerpt\">\n<p>                        This content was published on                    <\/p>\n<p>                        Sep 9, 2024                    <\/p>\n<p>                The head of the group of experts for the Swiss government\u2019s savings proposals sees his work vindicated by the criticism coming from the right and the left.            <\/p>\n<p>    <a class=\"teaser-wide-card__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/swiss-politics\/criticism-reinforces-the-head-of-the-expert-groups-austerity-measures\/87514512\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><\/p>\n<p>            Read more: Swiss finance expert defends austerity measures<br \/>\n    <\/a><\/p>\n<p>Adapted from French by AI\/sb<\/p>\n<p>                How we work            <\/p>\n<p>We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.<\/p>\n<p>If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/swiss-politics\/swiss-senate-seeks-bigger-cuts-to-climate-protection\/mailto:english@swissinfo.ch\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">english@swissinfo.ch<\/a><\/p>\n<p>        Articles in this story    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter supports a vast savings programme to help federal finances out of the red.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,326,100,1456,103,10112,102,41,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-28842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-beat-swiss-politics","10":"tag-latest-news","11":"tag-politics-general","12":"tag-production-type-deepl-autotranslation","13":"tag-public-finance","14":"tag-sda-ready-to-publish","15":"tag-swiss","16":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116204061616370227","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}