Climate Action 2012-2013

POLICY, GOVERNANCE AND FINANCE
makes crafting climate and energy legislation in
the EU and ensuring effective implementation
across member states a strategic necessity.
A recognition of this necessity led to the 2010
publication of the European Climate Foundation’s
landmark report, Roadmap 2050, A practical guide to
a prosperous, low-carbon Europe. This extensive piece
of work, which drew on the expertise of industry,
NGOs, academics and consultants, demonstrated
how the low-carbon transition is both
economically affordable and technically feasible.
A central conclusion was that clean electricity
from a decarbonised power sector is a key driver
to achieve the 80-95 per cent emissions reduction
goal. Thanks to this project, the ECF and the
organisations it supports were able to redouble
our efforts in helping policy-makers across the
EU understand the logic of decarbonisation and
to incorporate this logic into legislation.
The merits of decarbonising the power sector
are now largely understood by European
policy-makers. Energy ministers acknowledged
the merits last June, when they accepted the
European Commission’s Energy 2050 Roadmap.
This document stressed that “decarbonisation
is possible and can be less costly than current
policies in the long term”. While there is
broad understanding that European energy
infrastructure needs to be renewed in the coming
years, only by replacing high-carbon with lowcarbon
infrastructure do we stand a chance of
meeting our climate targets. This calls for a major
shift in investments, which will materialise only if
there are reliable signals for investors and robust
market designs that can handle high shares of
renewable energies.
“As long as the economic
winds were favourable, the EU
did manage to make significant
progress.”
Another example is the European Emissions
Trading Scheme (ETS), a central pillar of
European climate policy, designed to costeffectively
reduce carbon emissions over the long
term. As the world’s first transnational carbon
trading system, it has been an ambitious
climateactionprogramme.org 41