The Paris Agreement: a new international framework to facilitate the uptake of carbon pricing

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. 

In this year’s edition, we assess these indicators retrospectively—over the past ten years for deep energy retrofits, and over the past five for electric mobility—to identify factors that have improved or worsened economic accessibility to transition solutions in recent years.

In a challenging geo-political context, Europe has a window of opportunity to lead on both climate action and industrial competitiveness. As Mario Draghi highlighted in his report last year, this can only happen if decarbonisation ambitions are backed by real investment – and there is an urgent need to boost those investment. The European Commission followed suit and pledged to be an “Investment Commission,” while reaffirming its commitment to implement the 2030 emission reduction targets and to stay to course on the longer-term targets.