In January 2015, the Republic of South Korea’s ETS officially began. The system features the second largest emissions cap after the EU ETS and the largest sectoral scope including ; waste, buildings and aviation.
Published in May 2015 by I4CE together with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
This year marks an important milestone for I4CE: we are celebrating our 10-year anniversary. Setting sails the year the Paris Agreement was adopted, our mission was clear from the outset: to promote effective, efficient and fair policies for the climate transition. Since then, we have focused our economic analysis on public policies with an emphasis on assessing the investment needs and policy options for the transition. Our ambition has been to advance the public debate on climate with facts and figures, promoting long-term investment plans as an essential tool to turn political ambitions into reality. Over the years, we have applied this approach to a growing number of policy areas and expanded our geographical scope from France to Europe and internationally.
The next long term EU budget will take us through the 2030 goal posts, by when GHG emissions should be down by 55%. It will also lay the groundwork for investing in a climate-neutral future for the continent towards the yet-to-be agreed objectives for 2040. So, when the European Commission presented its proposal for a €2 trillion multiannual financial framework (MFF) just before the summer break, there was good reason to carefully study the details from the perspective of closing the EU’s climate investment deficit.
Europe is making progress on the clean transition, but the pace is too slow across several parametres. ECNO’s analysis is structured around 13 building blocks of the transition, tracking changes in the six-year trend for nearly 150 indicators and also the expected impact of policies – a new addition to this year’s report. In the 2025 edition, we also analysed the changes through the lens of broader EU objectives, namely competitiveness, resilience, and citizens’ well-being.
