Fifty Shades of Green: Sustainable finance and the EU taxonomy
Seventh episode of the podcast "Green Deal – Big Deal?"
- Publication
- Citation
Ecologic Institute 2022: Fifty shades of green: sustainable finance and the EU taxonomy. Podcast. Online: https://greendealbigdeal.podigee.io/7-sustainable-finance
How do we classify which investments are the right ones to power the transition to a climate and nature-friendly economy? This is a pretty big question, and one that is crucial to a successful implementation of the European Green Deal. The EU taxonomy – the subject of our latest episode – specifies the various criteria that investments will need to fulfil to be considered sustainable. In practice, the taxonomy is a long list of economic activities with benchmark performance standards.
But how do we guarantee that these investments actually achieve what they are set out to do? How do we ensure that we don’t finance activities that support one goal, such as climate change mitigation, but harm our ability to achieve others (e.g., reversing biodiversity loss)? And how is the EU taxonomy implemented in practice? In the latest "Green Deal – Big Deal?" podcast episode, the hosts Ewa Iwaszuk and Aaron Best from Ecologic Institute discuss these questions, together with their interview guests Ben Allen (Research Director at the Institute for European Environmental Policy) and Nicole Krämer (Sustainability Analyst at Greenomy).
Ben Allen has served as a co-rapporteur for the Technical Working Group of the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance, an expert group that was convened by the European Commission to assist in developing the taxonomy. He gives us a look behind the scenes of how the EU taxonomy was designed and explains how the current taxonomy deviates from the expert group’s initial proposal. Looking at the EU taxonomy through a business lens, Nicole Kramer describes the challenges and opportunities businesses face when implementing the EU taxonomy.
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