Ref. Ares(2020)552094 - 29/01/2020
Frans Timmermans
Executive Vice-President
European Commission
Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat 200
1049 Brussels
Belgium
28 January 2019
Dear Mr Timmermans,
Turning the European Green Deal into an investible proposition for business:
request for a meeting
I wanted to congratulate you on your appointment as Executive Vice-President and to request
a meeting with you, alongside
, to
discuss how the European Green Deal can be turned into an investible proposition for business
whilst delivering the environmental, economic and social benefits the EU needs.
As you might remember from our recent engagement on the Circular Economy Package, the
Aldersgate Group is a cross-economy and cross-civil society organisation that focuses on
policy solutions that can tackle environmental issues effectively in a way that can also deliver
economic benefits. Our business members, who come from a wide range of European
600bn, believe that pursuing an
ambitious and detailed environmental and climate policy agenda is essential to the future
competitiveness of the European economy as well as being important in its own right.
The Aldersgate Group strongly welcomes the European Green Deal and would like to offer its
support in the development of some of its key pillars. Through its close engagement with
businesses and recent work on the EU s Circular Economy Package, Sustainable Finance
Action Plan and the UK net zero target, the Aldersgate Group has developed valuable
expertise in the policy levers needed to grow the flows of green finance and accelerate
Europe s transition towards a competitive, net zero emissions and circular economy.
Beyond the publication of the Climate Law and a m
s 2030 climate
targets, we believe that a successful Green Deal needs to be underpinned by:
New regulatory drivers and fiscal incentives to complete the decarbonisation of
and make significant progress in cutting emissions from the
building stock;
A low-carbon industrial strategy for Europe, focused on delivering deep cuts in
the emissions of hard to treat sectors like heavy industry, helping them become
globally competitive providers of low-carbon goods and services and supporting the
workforce in this transition. As noted in the European Green Deal Communication,
decarbonisation of sectors like steel, cement and heat will require trialling critical
technologies such as carbon capture, electrification and the use of hydrogen at scale.
In addition to the Commission s consideration of a carbon border adjustment tariff, a
successful industrial strategy will also need to be supported by market creation policies
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such as European product standard regulations driving down the embedded carbon
content of industrial goods and by a low-carbon skills strategy, which will help the
workforce adapt to the changing nature of jobs during the net zero transition;
An updated action plan to accelerate the shift towards a more circular European
economy. As highlighted by the recent EU Life + Rebus project that the Aldersgate
Group was involved in, the Commission can play a key role in this transition by
broadening the scope of EU eco-design product regulations to mandate greater
resource efficiency, providing comprehensive technical and funding support for
business innovation, and encouraging Member States to use public procurement rules
and pricing incentives to grow the demand for resource efficient products and services;
A plan to improve the environmental resilience of
supply chains, so that society and the economy are better prepared to adapt to the
impacts of climate change. This in particular requires measures to grow public and
private sector investment in the natural environment (such as through natural capital
markets) through the upcoming Biodiversity Strategy and EU Adaptation Plan;
An updated Sustainable Finance Action Plan that accelerates the flows of public
and private finance towards green infrastructure. This requires continuing to reform
financial regulations in areas like capital weighting adjustment, fiduciary duties,
environmental risk disclosure and green finance definitions. It needs to be supported
by as full an alignment as possible between the objectives of the Climate Law,
Budget and the investment strategy of
institutions;
A climate diplomacy and trade strategy that encourages other key emitters to adopt
net zero emission targets and that promotes high environmental standards that are in
I would be delighted to discuss these issues with you in more detail and would be happy to
bring along a few of our business members to this meeting. In the meantime, I am enclosing
setting out the next steps for the Circular
Economy Package, launched in 2019 with then Vice-President Katainen, as well as our paper,
Securing Clean Growth for the EU, which we published as part of the Institute of European
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
@aldersgategroup.org.uk www.aldersgategroup.org.uk