In a letter, the MEPs urged Barroso to keep the current environment portfolio and appoint an extra commissioner for climate action instead.
"We still find no reason for reducing the portfolio of competences of your directorate-general for environment regarding climate policies," reads the letter, seen by EurActiv.
According to MEPs, led by Jo Leinen, chairman of the European Parliament's influential environment committee, if the EU has gained international and domestic respect and recognition over the last ten years, it has been in environmental and climate policy.
MEP argue that a sustainable climate policy "can be best advanced by a fully empowered DG [directorate-general] Environment to cooperate with all other DGs to push for effective climate policies".
For that reason, the MEPs suggest that the next Commission's environment department must have two heads, one responsible for environment and one responsible for climate action.
Last May, a similar cross-party group of MEPs, headed by centre-right Irish MEP Avril Doyle, had criticised the Commission over its plans for a new DG on energy and climate change. At the time, Doyle had declared that climate change was a stand-alone issue.
Speaking to EurActiv, one of the signatories of the letter, Finnish MEP Sirpa Pietikäinen (European People's Party), noted that climate is just one of many environmental issues and needs to be interlinked with all other environmental concerns. Climate policies require a transversal and sustainable approach, looking at industrial emissions, transport, energy, buildings, agriculture, development and foreign policy, she underlined.
Despite many EU countries having gone down the road of merging energy and climate issues in their ministries, Pietikäinen said only those with a long-standing tradition of environmental commitment had done so successfully. "Looking at our EU debate on renewable and sustainable criteria, for example, merging the two would not work," she added.
The letter further explains that the climate crisis is, first and foremost, a global environmental crisis, which was triggered by energy choices, poor management of natural resources and imbalanced production and consumption patterns.
Therefore, the necessary coordination between the two proposed commissioners "would be the best institutional guarantee for a climate policy able to drive the decarbonisation of our energy sector, create green jobs and provide the impetus for shifting towards a more enlightened system of production and consumption able to address the biodiversity-related drivers of climate change," MEPs told Barroso.
