Publications

ECNO's analysis is structured around 13 building blocks of the transition, tracking six-year trends across nearly 146 indicators, as well as the expected impact of climate-related public policies.

On the cusp of the Age of Electricity, Europe is on a mission to both strengthen industrial competitiveness and accelerate decarbonisation. The European Commission’s Clean Industrial Deal serves as the blueprint to deliver this ambition.

An Improved Forest Management (IFM) methodology has been initiated under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming regulation (CRCF), alongside a near-finalised afforestation methodology. As concerns grow over the declining capacity of Europe’s forests, determining which forest management practices should be incentivised through carbon certification is far from straightforward. 

The energy crisis exposes the EU structural vulnerabilities: accelerating investment in clean energy and low-carbon technologies is key to securing economic prosperity, energy independence, and households’ purchasing power.

In December, the European Commission launched a public consultation to inform the next revision of the regulation, scheduled for the last quarter of 2026. The Commission is particularly seeking stakeholders’ views on the need to transform NECPs into real investment plans. 

Europe is levelling up its industrial policy. From the Clean Industrial Deal to proposals for a more flexible EU budget, the Commission signals new ambition to build scale in strategic cleantech sectors and strengthen Europe’s decarbonising industrial base. Yet this firepower risks losing impact if spread too thinly. Limited resources demand sharper focus. As the Draghi Report made clear, Europe must act strategically: understand its industrial strengths and vulnerabilities, prioritise the sectors that matter most, and align funds, regulation, and institutional capacity accordingly. 

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. 

This 2025 edition of the Global Carbon Accounts presents a landscape of carbon pricing instruments through the lens of their current and potential contribution to scale up climate and development finance. Several jurisdictions are already using carbon revenues to support a range of policy objectives, including decarbonization efforts and support for economic actors most affected by the transition. Yet there is still potential for them to further contribute to fill the gap.

With the second edition of our State of Europe’s Climate Investment report, we take stock of the development in investments supporting the climate transition in the EU27. The report assesses the real-economy annual investments needed to meet the 2030 targets set out in the Green Deal and Net Zero Industry Act for the energy, buildings, transport and clean tech manufacturing sectors. We track the actual investments in those sectors in the EU economy, highlight the deficits and analyse challenges to mobilise investments.

With Member States meeting this week to discuss the progress and future of EU R&I funding at the Competitiveness Council a group of civil society, research and cleantech organisations, including I4CE, have today issued an open letter urging EU policymakers to put clean technology research and innovation (R&I) at the centre of the bloc’s long-term […]

Integrating climate indicators into variable remuneration is a burning issue. Although it was removed at the last minute from negotiations on the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), the proposal is still very much alive in the policy debate . While the topic is becoming increasingly central to remuneration in large companies, it still appears to be a taboo within the banking sector. This requirement was already included in the European Central Bank's supervisory guidelines as early as 2020, yet it appears to have been largely neglected by banks.

The EU Competitiveness Compass has made connecting decarbonisation and competitiveness a “strategic imperative” for Europe. This will be delivered by the all-important Clean Industrial Deal – the flagship policy package on which this new Commission hopes to upgrade Europe’s industrial base and tackle the climate crisis simultaneously.

Methodologies for target-setting and climate alignment assessment: Current status and future prospects for taking further account of nature and resilience. Economic players must face climate change and sustainability issues by transforming economic models, while strengthening their competitiveness and resilience.

Sectoral climate change mitigation scenarios for strategy development and alignment assessment by economic players: Current status and future prospects for taking further account of nature and resilience All sectors face growing pressures to transform their business models in response to multiple challenges (sustainability issues, technological supremacy, control over natural resources, etc.), while strengthening their competitiveness […]

As the European economy decarbonizes, economic assets across sectors are at risk of stranding or repricing from transition pressures. Yet private financial institutions, particularly banks, often narrowly focus on fossil fuel credit losses using historical data, underestimating broader ‘whole of economy’ stranding risks. Risk mitigation in the form of prudential capital buffers and loss provisions […]

A step forward for green industrial policy, or another stumbling block. Context. The world's largest economies are turning towards green industrial policy to support their cleantech manufacturing to accelerate their decarbonisation, competitiveness, and economic resilience. In this cleantech race, the EU has several disadvantages, including higher costs of energy and labour, a less dynamic investment environment, and the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Made in China 2025.

Directing more wood towards long-life products such as panels and insulation materials can help us maximise carbon sinks without increasing forest harvests. That’s because these products store carbon for a longer periods of time in form of long-lasting construction and renovation materials. But for this to happen in practice, more market opportunities and production capacity are needed. How can public policies help?

Assessing the state of progress to inform next steps in policy-making. The European Union (EU) is on its journey to become climate neutral by 2050. This multigenerational project holds many societal, economic, and environmental opportunities. At the same time, it is of unprecedented scale and implies considerable changes to the current systems, which need to be anticipated and addressed for the transition to be fair and acceptable to all. Regular progress checking is the key to understanding where the EU stands on the journey. It allows to identify challenges and opportunities and take targeted policy action guiding investment, supply, consumption, and societal development. There is still no official, comprehensive, and regular EU-wide progress monitoring to achieve this. This second ECNO progress check aims to close the current information gap. It provides a comprehensive view on the state of EU progress towards climate neutrality and identifies key areas of action for the next policy cycle.

Private financial institutions must rethink their approach to managing stranded asset risks. The current narrative on quantifying fossil fuel sector exposures within a limited scope of financial portfolios (mostly loans) largely underestimates potential stranding losses. As the low-carbon transition impacts all economic sectors, private financial institutions (FIs) must consider material transition-driven stranding risks within their overall transition risk management framework using a ‘whole of economy’ lens. Traditional risk management approaches are ill-suited to the methodological and quantification challenges of transition-driven stranding risks, so a flexible, dynamic, forward-looking approach is necessary. Strong, incentivising public policy coordinated with financial regulatory and supervisory impetus is necessary to preemptively identify, monitor and manage stranding losses on ‘assets-at-risk’ (i.e., potential stranded assets). The ECB finds that 40% of the total loan portfolio of euro area banks is exposed to energy-intensive sectors*, making them vulnerable to transition risks, including stranding. It is time for an urgent reframing of the stranded asset narrative to avoid significant financial losses (endangering financial stability) and direct orderly transition finance flows to retire or transform assets-at-risk before they become fully stranded.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) is clarifying how the banks should frame their “transition plan” as required by the EU prudential regulation. The transition plan is the bank’s strategic roadmap to prepare for the transition to a sustainable economy as framed by the jurisdictions they operate in, including an EU climate-neutral economy. It has been introduced in several EU regulatory frameworks, including as a disclosure requirement arising from the CSRD. The prudential framework and the EBA are focusing on a specific angle: how the banks plan to manage their financial risks related to the transition. EBA’s framing of these plans will be key to determine whether the banks will manage their financial risks consistently with the broader need of financing the transition to a low-carbon economy.