Reclaim Finance and 129 NGOs and experts urge the European Commission to root the EU’s ‘sustainable’ Taxonomy in science.
The detailed joint statement outlines and analyses ten priority areas of concern in the European Commission’s draft. The taxonomy covers which sectors can be classed as ‘sustainable’ in terms of their climate impacts.
The ten areas range from fossil fuels, bioenergy and hydropower to livestock and hydrogen. In many of them, the European Commission appears to have ignored the recommendations of its own Technical Expert Group on the Taxonomy, which were largely science-based and robust. The draft brands burning forests to produce energy or manufacturing hydrogen using coal and gas as sustainable. Reclaim Finance has previously explained the dangers and pollution inherent in biomass as an energy source.
The signatories also state that the European Commission has rightly set a limit on carbon dioxide from power plants that would exclude fossil fuels from being included as ‘sustainable’. This limit is crucial for the integrity of the Taxonomy and should be maintained and tightened every five years, as proposed by the Technical Expert Group, to bring the EU towards its climate neutrality target and supported by 123 scientists in an open letter to EU Commission President von der Leyen.