15 Dec 2020

130 NGOs and experts are sounding the alarm on the EU’s green finance rules, the ‘Taxonomy’, and calling for them to be rooted in science. In a detailed joint statement, the groups flag and analyse ten priority areas of concern in the European Commission’s draft, which covers which sectors can be classed as ‘sustainable’ in terms of their climate impacts. The ten areas range from fossil fuels, bioenergy and hydropower to livestock and hydrogen. In many of them, the European Commission appears to have ignored the recommendations of its own Technical Expert Group on the Taxonomy, which were largely science-based and robust.

The signatories state, however, that the European Commission has rightly set a limit on carbon dioxide from power plants that would exclude fossil fuels from being included as ‘sustainable’. This limit is crucial for the integrity of the Taxonomy and should be maintained and tightened every five years, as proposed by the Technical Expert Group, to bring the EU towards its climate neutrality target. 123 scientists supported this gradual tightening of the threshold last week in an open letter to EU Commission President von der Leyen...

The ten areas raised by the NGOs are: 
Fossil fuels, incineration - economic activities that were rightly excluded and should not be reincluded 
Bioenergy, hydropower, forestry, inland water transport, biofuels and biogas use in transport, hydrogen - economic activities to be improved with tighter criteria
Sea and coastal water transport, livestock - economic activities to be removed from the EU sustainable taxonomy