Publications

La transition net‑zéro, c’est-à-dire la transformation vers une économie neutre en carbone et résiliente, est un défi majeur et urgent pour réduire les effets du changement climatique. Cette transformation nécessite la transition et l’adaptation de toutes les activités et de tous les agents économiques. Elle relève d’abord de la sphère économique réelle et doit s’appuyer sur une feuille de route opérationnelle des actions à mener. Celle-ci doit être définie par une politique économique ambitieuse (budgétaire, fiscale, monétaire, réglementation des produits et des secteurs, etc.).

What are the carbon taxes and markets around the world, the range of carbon prices, the revenues generated, the emissions covered by these mechanisms? Find the answers to these questions, and many more, in the new edition of the Global Carbon Accounts from I4CE.

Achieving carbon neutrality will require the redirection of harvested wood towards long-life uses. To achieve carbon neutrality, France is relying on its carbon sink to balance residual emissions in 2050. A smaller carbon sink would require even greater emissions reductions from other sectors (transport, agriculture, industry, etc.), sectors in which France is already calling for drastic sixfold cuts between 1990 and 2050. In a context where the carbon sink in ecosystems is already falling sharply due to an increase in tree mortality, preserving this sink and developing carbon storage in wood products must be a major concern of the national climate policy.

The issue of access to the transition for all households, in particular, for low- and middle-income households, has become central to the French public debate, as recently shown by the French President’s speech on ecological planning, when he referred to “an ecology that is accessible and fair, that leaves no one without a solution”. This growing awareness is particularly in response to the yellow vests protests: expecting households to take steps towards the transition if they have no access to solutions (electric cars, public transport, home insulation, heating upgrades) results in a rejection of transition policies and leads us collectively to a dead end

Time to take stock, 4 years after the first experiments   Report only available in French   A momentum for green budgeting is gaining ground within local authorities: In the space of four years, around a hundred of them have embarked on the green budgeting process or have plans to do so. This includes nearly […]

The European Union (EU) Innovation Fund is Europe’s largest fund for climate innovation. It has a keyrole to play in European climate action, energy security and technological leadership. To unleash the full potential of European cleantech, greater public support is needed to help more companies and projects cross the so-called “valleys of death” that are inherent to cleantech innovation and scale-up. In this endeavour, relying solely on national public funds would create two risks. In countries where governments do not rise to the financing challenge, innovators will fail or flee. Conversely, governments with the fiscal means to spend big on cleantech may create a harmful subsidy race among EU member states, undermining EU solidarity and the integrity of the EU Single Market.

National budgets, as the main driver of public action, need to be ‘greened’ by governments to achieve the transition to low-carbon, climate-resilient, and sustainable economies. That is, budgeting processes need to ensure sufficient funds are directed towards green activities and are directed away from environmentally harmful ones.

Local authorities have a major role to play in achieving France’s 2050 carbon neutrality objectives, as set out in the National Low-Carbon Strategy (Stratégie Nationale Bas Carbone, SNBC). Due to their assets and areas of expertise, local authorities must make numerous climate investments, implement strategies and action plans, and take measures to encourage stakeholders within their territories. This study aims to estimate the cost of such climate action for local authorities. 

Industry: relocation and decarbonisation at the heart of the debate. The recent succession of crises (health, energy, geopolitical) and increased international competition have prompted France to look for ways to strengthen its industrial and energy sovereignty. It faces this challenge in addition to the challenge of decarbonising its industry. In this context, France and Europe are developing industrial policies with two objectives – relocation and decarbonisation – and with new tools such as the France 2030 plan and the Net Zero Industry Act at the European level. These policies target both ‘historical’ industries, such as steel and cement, and new clean technologies, from solar to batteries.

Since their introduction, climate stress tests have taken a lot of space in the public debate. Put in the spotlight by supervisors and the NGFS, their primary objective is to encourage banks to integrate climate-related risks into their activities and to carry out an initial assessment of the banks' capacity to deal with these risks.

This report co-written with NewClimate provides practical guidance for international financial institutions to support financial institutions’ alignment with the Paris Agreement goals, and to more broadly contribute to transforming local financial systems. This guidance is developed around three pillars: a harmonised alignment assessment; the alignment of financial intermediaries; and the alignment of financial systems at the national level.

Livestock population in France has been falling for several decades (-20% for dairy cattle and -33% for sows since 2000), without necessarily reducing the quantities produced. But productivity gains will not be able to maintain production levels forever. For the decline in livestock farming to have an impact on the climate, it must be accompanied by a drop in meat consumption, but is this really happening?

Accompanying the decline in livestock numbers. All transition scenarios rely on a decline in livestock numbers to meet climate targets. Yet in France, most livestock populations are already declining. The challenge is not only to continue this trend, but also to support it, to ensure a fair and acceptable transition for livestock farmers and other players in the livestock industry. This is particularly true for the dairy sector.

For years, the European Union assumed it would lead the cleantech race because it was the only one running in it. Mistakenly so. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US quickly catches up. This brief argues that the best EU policy answer to the IRA is an EU long‑term climate investment plan. As the political appetite for such a plan is currently limited, the European Commission should use the political momentum to propose a targeted investment plan that focuses on the development, scale-up, manufacturing and deployment of clean technologies in the EU. It identifies three first bricks that can already be laid out to build this plan.

While French local authorities have important levers for adaptation, they will only be able to mobilize them if certain conditions are met at national level: the entire effort cannot rest on their initiative alone. This is what this I4CE's Climate Report shows. There is an urgent need for a discussion on adaptation between the national government and subnational authorities.

Private finance will not fund the transition without a stronger commitment from public authorities. For several years, and particularly since COP 26, considerable time and attention has been dedicated to the subject of voluntary commitments from private financial actors. These commitments, made within the framework of international initiatives, should in principle enable private finance to be mobilized for the transition to a carbon neutral economy.

2022, France is paying dearly for a dependence on fossil fuels maintained by a chronic lack of investment in the decarbonisation of the economy. This edition of the Landscape of climate finance in France makes a detailed analysis of these critical expenditures by households, companies and public authorities, in the retrofitting of buildings, the purchase of electric vehicles, and renewable energies, as well as in rail, cycling and urban public transport infrastructures. Encouragingly, climate investments have increased significantly in the past year, driven, among other factors, by favourable regulations and by state support under the recovery plan. But this growth remains fragile, and analysis of several transition scenarios shows that climate investments need to increase further in order to stay on track to carbon neutrality and to ensure a lasting reduction in France’s dependence on fossil fuels.

According to I4CE's research, to meet European and international commitments made by France to carbon neutrality, French local authorities need to more than double their annual climate-related investments (from €5.5 billion to €12 billion annually), to around 20% of their current total capital expenditure.  

The European Union has made rapid progress on the issue of transition plans for companies and banks. First of all, the CSRD directive obliges each listed company to publish its plan for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Published by EFRAG this summer, the standards set for these plans can be considered ambitious and commensurate with the challenges they face. With regards to banks, it is now clear that they will be required to publish their transition plan. What remains under debate is whether these transition plans should be integrated into prudential regulations, which would open the way to numerous possibilities of action and sanctions by supervisors.

Long term national climate strategies, such as Long-Term Strategies (LTS) published to the UNFCCC, are key documents developed by governments to envision the transition to a low-carbon and climate resilient economy at the 2050 (or later) time-horizon. As of the beginning of COP 27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, on November 2022, 55 countries had submitted an LTS to the UNFCCC, answering renewed calls for countries to develop such strategies at COP 26. It is expected that additional LTS will be published shortly.