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Catching up with climate investment in the European Union

The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will audition the European Commissioner-designates in early November. The hearings are a crucial moment to seek commitment from the EU’s next executive team on the priorities for the coming five years and how they will delivered – including on the urgent issue of investment in the climate transition.

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Press contact Amélie FRITZ Head of Communication and press relations

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  • 21/11/2023 Op-ed
    Cleantech divide looms in Europe
    Investment in the development of the cleantech sector in Europe is too slow and unevenly spread across EU member states and despite its best intentions, it is not clear that the EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) will rectify this. Unveiling the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) earlier this year, Ursula Von Der Leyen declared it would “create the best conditions for those sectors that are crucial for us to reach net-zero by 2050: technologies like wind turbines, heat pumps, solar panels, renewable hydrogen as well as CO2 storage.”
  • 30/10/2023 Blog post
    Response to GFANZ APAC on financing the early retirement of coal-fired power plants
    NewClimate Institute and the Institute for Climate Economics (I4CE) submitted a response to a public consultation on the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero’s proposed set of voluntary guidance for financing the early retirement of coal-fired power plants in Asia-Pacific. This blog post highlights key points from our submission. Preventing the worst impacts of the climate crisis, particularly for the most vulnerable, requires halting coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) in the pipeline and retiring a substantial portion of the existing global coal fleet before the end of their technical lifetime. While countries have committed to phase out unabated coal in the Glasgow Climate Pact, 350 GW of new capacity is proposed globally with an additional 192 GW under construction.
  • 30/10/2023 Foreword of the week
    Wood industry: What are European countries doing?
    Year after year, France becomes aware of the drastic deterioration in the carbon sink of its forests. Tree mortality increases sharply with droughts and health crises. Yet France needs this carbon sink to achieve its climate objectives and needs to preserve it by improving the resilience of its forests, but also - and this is less obvious - by making the best possible use of the harvested wood from the forests. France's climate strategy is counting heavily on maximising the carbon sink in wood products, i.e. making greater use of the wood harvested to manufacture long-lasting products, particularly in the construction industry. Some products store carbon over the long term, and are not only those that we imagine at first glance, as we showed in a previous study. 
  • 27/10/2023 Climate Report
    Developing long-life wood uses: a look at the German, Romanian and Swedish industries
    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.
  • 19/10/2023 Climate Report
    Is the transition accessible to all French households?
    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
  • 13/10/2023 Foreword of the week
    Climate investment: the French receipe
    Climate action is a rich stew with many ingredients. From transport to agriculture, construction to forestry, every part supports the whole. The stew would be incomplete without one crucial but rare addition: public investment. Chefs d’état in Paris and Brussels are currently scratching their heads on how best to add this ingredient to the pot. Two hurdles face them: how to invest enough, and how to guarantee that investment over the long term.  In this newsletter, we have translated some of I4CE's analysis to better understand what's going on in the French kitchen, complemented with a dash of a European cleantech investment plan.
  • 12/10/2023 Climate Report
    Green Budgeting: feedback from local authorities
    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 […]
  • 09/10/2023 Blog post
    Taking a first STEP towards a cleantech investment plan
    The EU’s Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) is an important boost towards unlocking future cleantech public finance. In this blog, Ciarán Humphreys argues that Member States should get behind a European solution.
  • 03/10/2023 Blog post
    Climate: five key debates from the French marathon budget
    Climate change and ecological planning are taking centre stage in this autumn’s budgetary measures. The public finance programming act, which has yet to be discussed with the Senate, now requires the government to set out a multi-year funding strategy for planning. The finance bill for 2024, which will go through Parliament soon, earmarks an additional €7 billion in transition support for households, businesses and local authorities. This €7 billion does not, however, resolve the issue of financing the climate transition, and in this post we provide an overview of the key climate debates that will take place, or ought to take place according to I4CE, during this veritable marathon budget.
  • 02/10/2023 Op-ed
    France will (finally) adopt a strategy to finance the ecological transition
    The financing strategy, an essential element of ecological planning, has previously been set out annually in the finance bill. From now on, the government will be drawing up a multi-year strategy that will give both the State and the private sector a clear view of the future. This was long overdue.
  • 29/09/2023 Foreword of the week
    Adaptation: plotting pathways is the next essential step
    As stated by the European Commission there is a “lack of preparedness and [a] disproportion between the climate threats and response mechanisms and structures in place”. One of the key factors in speeding up the implementation of adaptation actions will be the definition, in particular by public authorities, of « clear adaptation pathways setting up the process of how to achieve them through the sequence of options and actions ». The cost of these trajectories will also need to be quantified, to ensure that the human and financial resources are available for implementation.  For the time being, this work of defining adaptation trajectories is generally lacking, whatever the sector or scale. And the means to be deployed for adaptation are therefore unknown.
  • 20/09/2023 Hors série
    Climate: the risk of polarisation – Annual Report 2023
    I4CE produit des expertises innovantes afin d’informer les débats sur les politiques publiques pour la transition climatique. Mais nous ne faisons pas qu’écrire des rapports, nous voulons avoir de l’impact. Nous allons au contact des décideurs, des médias, des parties prenantes pour apprendre d’eux et faire que ces politiques progressent, concrètement. Nous vous invitons, en parcourant notre rapport d’activité, à découvrir les débats qui intéressent I4CE, les changements majeurs de politique publique des douze derniers mois et comment nous y avons contribués.
  • 15/09/2023 Foreword of the week
    From denial to acceptance: Europe’s next step in the cleantech race
    Psychologists sometimes talk about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. One year on from the announcement of the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the European response has looked startlingly similar. Public anger in Brussels at perceived American protectionism. Private sector depression at the prospect of Europe falling behind in the global cleantech race. Denial of the gap between the EU and US efforts, by arguing that that all EU and national spending on cleantech amounts to a conservative estimate of what the IRA offers (while not factoring in the full range of US support). 
  • 13/09/2023 Climate Report
    The sharpest tool in the box: how to strenghten the European Union Innovation Fund for climate competitiveness and security
    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.
  • 13/09/2023 Op-ed
    Call for a European Green Industrial Policy
    We are coming to the end of this Commission's mandate, time to think about the future of EU climate action. France and Germany called for a EU Green industrial policy last year but since then they have not yet show EU leadership. An EU policy needs to get 3 design elements right: Vision, Funding and Governance. In this OpEd, Stiftung KlimaWirtschaft and I4CE call for France and Germany to come together in leadership and, ahead of the EU elections, call for a European response to the great challenge of the 21st century.
  • 08/09/2023 Foreword of the week
    Development finance: From resolutions to actionable solutions
    The reform for a new global financing pact - as it was ambitiously designated by the French President Emmanuel Macron - allows little time for rest, combining several agendas that collectively seek to rethink how the Global South can finance its low-emission development pathways, with support from the Global North. The sequence of international events that starts this week with the Finance in common Summit, the African climate summit, G20 and followed by World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund’s Annual Meetings will be key to see if the multiple resolutions to reshape development finance outlined during the first semester of 2023 were merely wishful thinking or if they can be seen as the first bricks of a new international financial architecture. 
  • 31/08/2023 Blog post
    Synergising Sustainable Development Goals Finance with Climate Finance 
    Sustainable development and climate change are two pressing and interconnected issues that countries have committed to address at the international level. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including climate action, at its core was adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2015. The same year, the Paris Agreement was adopted by Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Both instruments have clear global and national targets in the medium- and long-term that are still far from being met.
  • 06/07/2023 Blog post
    Adaptation: putting the reference trajectory into law
    The French decision to define a reference warming trajectory for adaptation to climate change (TRACC) is good news. There is an urgent need for public and private actors to examine the resilience of their investments and activities in a changing climate, including if the target of limiting global warming to below +2°C – a target that must remain a priority – is not met. Going beyond its inclusion in the PNACC (French national climate change adaptation plan) will nevertheless be essential to ensure actors rapidly take up this trajectory and to prevent a single euro more being spent on assets that are not adapted to climate change. The cross-cutting and normative scope of the TRACC now needs to be guaranteed by making it an inter-ministerial issue and putting it into legislation, then progressively tailoring the implementation requirements to the different actors and sectors concerned.
  • 23/06/2023 Foreword of the week
    Better EU data for better climate action
    Twelve EU Member States have started implementing new budgetary processes to help align their public budgets with climate objectives. Green budget tagging, a prominent tool, can provide a clear picture of the share of a national budget that is aligned, or runs counter, with the national climate strategy. France publishes its annual green budget every year and now, for the first time in 2023, the government intends to use its data for the preparation of the draft budget law.
  • 15/06/2023 Blog post
    Paris Summit: more and better financing is needed for the transition
    On 22nd and 23rd of June, the Summit for a new Global Financing Pact, initiated by Emmanuel Macron and Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, will take place in Paris. This Summit will be a success for climate if it enables us to spend more on the climate transition, to spend better, and if it influences the ongoing reform of international development financing.

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