Why does the taxonomy miss the mark on construction?
Adopted in 2020, the Taxonomy Regulation defined environmentally sustainable activities to reduce the environmental impacts of businesses and investments. In 2021, the “Climate delegated act” introduced key performance indicators defined how buildings, construction, and related sectors could to make a ‘substantial contribution’ to mitigate climate change. However, these criteria fail to incentivise the use of low impact construction materials and do not cover a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper makes concrete proposals to amend the taxonomy climate mitigation criteria and ensure that investments marked as green are funding truly sustainable buildings.
The revisions of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) to be finalised in 2024 as well as the adoption of a new Taxonomy delegated act in June 2023 whose KPIs for the construction sector are more ambitious than the climate mitigation criteria are making the current climate taxonomy criteria obsolete. For the sake of consistency and to mitigate the risk that market actors can deliberately choose the least ambitious criteria and claim taxonomy alignment issue, this revision should take place as early as possible.
Why does the taxonomy miss the mark on construction?
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