As announced, on Wednesday 25 September, the Member States' ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) will agree a political agreement on the regulation laying the foundations for the future taxonomy on sustainable finance, which will assess, sector by sector, the ecological sustainability of economic activities (see EUROPE 12333/8).
“Today's agreement by the Member States is an important first step. I now hope that the co-legislators will quickly agree on an ambitious package that reflects the EU's ambition”, said European Commissioner for Financial Services Valdis Dombrovskis in a statement.
While an agreement has been reached, several Member States seem to have been left dissatisfied. This is the case in particular for Germany, Austria and Luxembourg, which would have liked the text to be more specific and to prohibit certain sectors, including nuclear energy, from gaining entry into the category of sustainable financial products - as the European Parliament has done (see EUROPE 12224/1).
In a joint statement attached to the compromise text, the three countries state that “any taxonomy that would allow for nuclear energy to be qualified as sustainable would be inherently flawed and could give rise to severe criticism, as it would send the wrong signals and incentives to financial market participants and investors”.
They are concerned that the Council’s proposed framework “would leave the door open to diverting financial resources away from environmentally sustainable activities and into technologies that cannot be considered either safe or sustainable”.
Greece, for its part, stated that the taxonomy “should not include any controversial points, but rather encapsulate the widely accepted goals of sustainability, in order to produce added value as a legislative tool”.
Austria also made an individual statement on the issue on the date of adoption of the delegated and implementing acts adopted by the Commission, laid down in the Council text of 31 December 2021. For the country, the acts on climate objectives could be adopted as early as 2020 and there is no need to postpone their adoption until the technical criteria are in place for all the other objectives.
See text and statements: http://bit.ly/2mCh1p7 (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)