EU Green Deal: the devil is in the (future) details

The Green Finance Observatory welcomes today’s Green Deal. It contains many very welcome measures, including the plan to increase in EU climate targets to 50/55% by 2030, proposing more stringent air pollution emission standards for cars, aligning air quality standards with WHO guidelines, fostering energy efficiency and reforms to tackle waste. The Green Deal however …

Can market-based solutions address critical loss of biodiversity?

As parties meet this week in Montreal to discuss the UN post 2020 biodiversity framework, we hope that they will keep financial markets on biodiversity destruction out of the framework, as it has been demonstrated that they cannot work. Putting a monetary value on the environment has been shown to be impossible due to high …

How natural are Natural Climate Solutions and why it matters?

Non-binding promises and significant contradictions suggest that Natural Climate Solutions are only the latest rebranding of failed carbon offsets. We propose a number of recommendations to ensure that NCS are not used to reorientate the climate debate away from reducing avoidable fossil fuel emissions, and can fulfil their (limited) potential to contribute to addressing climate …