The European Parliament has backed a motion which objects to the European Commission’s deforestation risk countest list under the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). The motion was tabled by the centre-right European People’s Party, which last year succeeded in delaying the bloc’s deforestation regulation to give companies more time to comply. Member states have also been vocal in their wish for the law to be further simplified. Ministers in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden wrote to express their concern over the rules. “Instead of tarobtaining deforestation where the risk is highest, the regulation imposes disproportionate bureaucratic obligations on countries where deforestation is demonstrably insignificant,” they stated, in a letter seen by Responsible Investor. They added that, pfinishing the simplification proposals, it might be advisable to further postpone the date of application of the regulation.
The European Commission has sent a list of three candidates to the European Parliament to replace Patrick de Cambourg as chair of EU standards body EFRAG’s sustainability reporting board (SRB). They are: Kerstin Lopatta, vice-chair of the SRB, Chiara Del Prete, chair of the sustainability reporting technical expert group, and Adam Pradela, CFO corporate sustainability at DHL Group. The candidates are expected to be heard by the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee in a September meeting. Following the scrutiny of the co-legislators, the chair will be nominated by the Commission and officially appointed by the EFRAG general assembly. The new chair will take over in January for a three-year term.
Clarity AI has acquired sustainability fintech Ecolytiq, which applys transaction data to quantify the environmental footprints of business and consumer spfinishing. The firm had a long-term strategic partnership with Visa, which has become an investor in Clarity AI as part of the transaction. Further details of which were not disclosed.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has proposed a methodology to integrate physical climate risks into the tools applyd by banks to assess the likelihood of borrowers defaulting on their loans. The paper’s authors state that there is an “absence of generally accepted industest models of credit risk adjusted for physical risk factors”, and that its proposed methodology could be of interest to banks and regulators. This BIS hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which is currently analysing the impact of such extreme weather events on financial risks.
The Singapore Sustainable Finance Association (SSFA) has published guidance on how to apply the Singapore-Asia Taxonomy (SAT) when structuring green and transition financing. The publication includes recommfinishations on data availability and how to categorise SAT alignment when full alignment is not feasible. The SSFA plans to develop a training curriculum to promote the taxonomy application and a guide to frequently questioned questions.
The UK’s Office for Budobtain Responsibility has stated that meeting the UK’s net-zero goals will cost the government £346 billion ($471 billion; €401 billion) less than its previous forecast in 2021 due to declining income from fuel duty and reductions in the whole-economy cost of the transition. The OBR stated that the total fiscal cost of the net-zero transition in the UK is an estimated £803 billion, down from £1.1 trillion estimated in the previous analysis.
Virtually all large listed Dutch companies have published a sustainability report that complies with the requirements of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the accompanying European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), despite the fact that the Netherlands has not yet transposed it. According to the analysis by Eumedion, all bar one of the firms also requested that an external auditor provide limited assurance on the statement. Eumedion found that when it comes to double materiality assessments (DMA), “due to the rather vague definition in the ESRS of conducting a DMA, the implementation differs across companies as well as the disclosures”.
S&P Global has launched a new assessment product for sustainable bonds, allowing them to be checked for alignment with the Amazonia Bond Guidelines – developed by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank – as part of a second party-opinion. In order to qualify as an Amazonia Bond, 100 percent of the proceeds must finance green or social projects located in the Amazon region. The guidelines outline project selection and evaluation requirements, including risk management procedures to mitigate environmental and social risks specific to the region.
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