People involved with advising on the EU’s list of sustainable activities are unhappy with how it has addressed biodiversity so far, the ex-biodiversity lead for influential advisory group Platform on Sustainable Finance (PSF) has said.

“There were some really good people working on that and they did a really good job. Everybody involved is pretty pissed off,” said Ingmar Juergens, CEO of think tank Climate & Company.

“We invested two to three years of our spare time into developing this and, at the end, somebody at the top level decided that ‘it’s politically inconvenient to publish this’,” he told Carbon Pulse.

PSF was appointed by the EU to advise it on its sustainable finance action plan, including its taxonomy. The Commission extended the taxonomy in June to cover areas including biodiversity, beyond its existing climate mitigation and adaptation objectives, in a ‘delegated act’ that is expected to apply from Jan. 2024.

Juergens was biodiversity lead for PSF from Sep. 2020 to Oct. 2022. In June this year, the EU Commission published technical screening criteria for biodiversity in the delegated act in an annex that included activities such as environmental protection for accommodation and hotels, while excluding biodiversity offsets.

The EU act should have included more biodiversity-related criteria, according to Juergens.

“Some of the most important criteria for biodiversity objectives from an impact and risks perspective were excluded from the taxonomy,” he said.

“What I don’t understand is why these pretty well-developed criteria, which were built on a lot of biodiversity expertise, were held back. What they published earlier this year, was from a biodiversity perspective, comparably irrelevant.”

PSF published a response to the delegated act in July.

In addition to being Climate & Company CEO, Juergens is now also a member of a biodiversity-focused expert working group with European Financial Reporting Advisory Group.

Climate & Company published feedback on the delegated act in May, saying biodiversity criteria “do not exist” for high-impact sectors, including agriculture and fishing.

The same month it contributed to separate analysis on the act, alongside other civil society organisations, recommending it include biodiversity criteria on the manufacture of food and beverages.

NUCLEAR EXPLOSION

Juergens claimed the EU Commission lost “so much political capital” in negotiations over whether to include gas and nuclear, under pressure from France and Germany, it could not add more biodiversity criteria to the taxonomy.

“It exploded with gas and nuclear. Everybody said: ‘What a ridiculous idea, from a pollution perspective to consider nuclear green, from a carbon perspective to consider gas as green’.”

“And that’s why then [the Commission] did not want to touch anything about the taxonomy that would have caused controversy in one way or the other. That’s why the Commission did not table the more relevant biodiversity criteria of the taxonomy,” Juergens said.

Some gas and nuclear activities were controversially included in the list of sustainable activities this year, under renewable actions to aid the transition to a low-carbon economy.

RIGHT-WING RESISTANCE

Whether more biodiversity criteria will be added to the taxonomy in future depends on political will, Juergens said.

“There seems to be limited appetite now to pick up the taxonomy again to add them back in.”

“What we’re seeing is increasing political background moving to the right, moving to enter into anti-woke, anti-green, anti-climate” in countries including Germany, France, and Italy, he said.

Against that backdrop, Juergens is “not too sure” if the taxonomy will include biodiversity criteria for sectors such as agriculture.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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