In order to promote sustainable business activities, the EU taxonomy has been introduced. This is a system that classifies environmentally sustainable business activities. Companies must provide information on how “green” their activities are. Now the EU Commission has published a proposal that expands the criteria and requires more companies to report.
The taxonomy is an EU-wide system for classifying sustainable economic activities. (Image source: Pixabay)
Changes concerning climate and environment
Regarding the environment, the EU Commission proposes to include four additional criteria:
- sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources
- transition to a circular economy
- prevention and reduction of environmental pollution
- protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems
Amendment of the Taxonomy Regulation
In addition, the Commission intends to introduce new reporting requirements on sustainability (amending Art. 8 of the Taxonomy Regulation). Accordingly, companies affected by the reporting obligation will in future have to provide information on the extent to which their business activities are linked to “environmentally sustainable” economic activities.
Taxonomy under criticism
Since January this year, the taxonomy regulation also allows investments that go into the natural gas and nuclear power industries to be considered sustainable. This has been met with a great deal of criticism. BUND, Greenpeace and WWF have therefore filed a complaint with the European Court of Justice.
The proposal oft he EU-Commission can be downloaded here.
Quellen: DIHK, EU-Commission, Tagesschau(german)
