Abstract
This study aims at making the potential implications of the ‘Green’ Taxonomy implementation emerge. The EU (European Union) regulatory framework on sustainability-related issues and the regulatory action in the area of non-financial or ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting have highlighted the need for more academic contributions. There could, indeed, be a risk of oversimplification of an issue that cannot be solved without considering its practical implications on the stakeholders affected. Hence, failing to think these through might result in tragic consequences from a societal standpoint, despite being outstanding from an environmental one. This critical analysis, thus, investigates a few crucial points pertaining to the EU ‘Green’ Taxonomy—as the latest classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities proposed by the EU—with the aim of providing academics and policymakers with a balanced report between theory and practice. By means of archival data, content analysis and bibliometric techniques, and implementing the steps of the systematic literature network analysis (SLNA) protocol which were deemed pertinent for the purposes of our study, we conducted a documentary review regarding the EU Taxonomy. Based on this critical analysis, we were able to outline (a) the rationale of Regulation (EU) 2020/852, (b) its structure, (c) its ability to improve corporate environmental performance and (d) the role played by specific nuclear and gas energy activities for a climate-neutral future. Every economic choice implies a cultural choice, and economics—unlike natural sciences—is essentially based on decisions, which can be influenced. The study, thus, concludes with proposals for future research and potential improvements of EU frameworks in order to support an efficient achievement of the Green Deal objectives and the 2030 Agenda.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request. In any case, they are openly available since data derived from public domain resources have been employed to carry out this study.
Notes
Take the air pollution and harmful emissions predominantly produced in China and Far East Asia, which are higher than those of the largest industrialised countries put together, and with Beijing alone responsible in 2019 for 27% of global emissions of harmful gases as an example.
In this study, we assume—due to the fact that the EU ‘Green’ Taxonomy effects in the medium/long term are still to be measured—that the EU Regulation in analysis represents one of the strategic tools adopted by the European Union as part of its holistic approach to sustainable development. As countries and regions all around the globe began to develop, industrialisation and economic growth led also to environmental degradation (Huppes & Mansanobu, 2007). Hence, an eco-efficiency approach (see also the concept of ‘sustainable degrowth’) started to take root in recent times as one of the most effective levers to promote a transformation from unsustainable development to one which was, on the contrary, sustainable (Yadong, 2013). In this regard, the EU ‘Green’ Taxonomy is deemed to be a potentially effective tool; yet, its positive effects are still to be verified.
This visual representation is drawn upon the keyword network analysis (KNA) intuition (see Comoli et al., 2023) for which documentary results gather through other bibliographic techniques could be improved by using the authors’ keywords network of a collection of articles extracted using the systematic literature review (SLR) protocol. The fundamental notion underlying the so-called co-occurrence analysis is that the authors’ keywords should serve as a proxy for the substance of the selected documents. In order to do so, VOSviewer software is typically used to map the topical keywords by dividing them into discrete clusters. In this study, VOSviewer was only run so to identify these clusters based on the associated keywords both on the academic paper sample (41) and on the professional documents (16). Subsequently, the depiction itself (i.e. Figure 4) has been created through a common visualisation tool. This framework, as it was determined, allowed for a topical presentation, in clusters, of the most relevant open issues pertaining to the wider research area under investigation.
Recital 7 states that: ‘Given the systemic nature of global environmental challenges, there is a need for a systemic and forward-looking approach to environmental sustainability that addresses growing negative trends, such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the global overconsumption of resources, food scarcity, ozone depletion, ocean acidification, the deterioration of the fresh water system, and land system change as well as the appearance of new threats, such as hazardous chemicals and their combined effects’. Moreover, Recital 10 states: ‘In view of the scale of the challenge and the costs associated with inaction or delayed action, the financial system should be gradually adapted in order to support the sustainable functioning of the economy. To that end, sustainable finance needs to become mainstream and consideration needs to be given to the sustainability impact of financial products and services’.
The delegated act in analysis, made public as a draft in December 2021, indeed provides for ‘clear and strict conditions under which certain nuclear and gas activities may be added as transitional activities to those already provided for in the first delegated act on climate mitigation and adaptation’.
Concerns, in this regard, are essentially fomented by a wary demand–supply imbalance. On the one hand, electricity demand has grown beyond expectations and its supply has remained at inadequate levels whereas, on the other, the electricity price formation mechanism (at least in Europe) appears to be characterised by higher marginal costs (Careri et al., 2022; Esposito et al., 2022). It is common knowledge, in economics, that electricity prices are formed on a trading platform, where demand and supply curves are mathematically constructed. This is built on ordering the production costs of all the plants that come into operation to meet hourly electricity demand per day, and consequent daily demand per year (Stagnaro, 2021). The price that is, thus, assigned to the wholesale electricity corresponds to the generation costs of the last plant that was necessary to meet demand at that time, and all other plants, bearing lower average generation costs, would be remunerated at that price: this policy rule was essentially established in order to incentivise investment. Yet the more time passes, the more it is worth investigating whether maintaining such a pricing system still makes sense in the current panorama, and based on the available technologies, or whether it would not be better, for instance, to adopt a system that remunerates energy for the actual cost of each plant.
Abbreviations
- CAPEX:
-
Capital expenditure
- CSRD:
-
Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
- EC:
-
European Commission
- EIA:
-
Environmental Impact Assessment
- ESG:
-
Environment, Social and Corporate Governance
- EPRS:
-
European Parliamentary Research Service
- EU:
-
European Union
- GIFT:
-
Green investment financial tool
- GRI:
-
Global reporting initiative
- LCA:
-
Life cycle assessment
- NFRD:
-
Non-financial reporting disclosure
- NRRP:
-
National recovery and resilience plan
- OPEX:
-
Operating expenditure
- REOCo:
-
Real estate owned company
- RRF:
-
Recovery and resilience facility
- SDG:
-
Sustainable development goal
- SLNA:
-
Systematic literature network analysis
- TEG:
-
Technical expert group
- WHO:
-
World Health Organization
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Tettamanzi, P., Gotti Tedeschi, R. & Murgolo, M. The European Union (EU) green taxonomy: codifying sustainability to provide certainty to the markets. Environ Dev Sustain (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03798-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03798-6