Al Gore's green investment firm announces carbon pricing research push

Environmental consultancy Ecofys is to pair up with the advocacy branch of Al Gore's sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management to investigate how carbon pricing can facilitate sustainable global economic growth, the two companies announced today.

The three-year project plans to explore how carbon pricing could be better integrated into economic policy and deployed along businesses' value chains in an attempt to boost the effectiveness emission reduction efforts.

It also hopes to deliver quantified insights into the role carbon pricing can play in limiting the global temperature rises to 1.5C, as proposed by the Paris Agreement.

"Carbon remains a largely unpriced externality in today's financial markets," said David Blood, senior partner of Gore's firm Generation Investment Management, in a statement. "Although it is impossible to know the exact timing of the prospective tipping point when financial markets will fully internalise carbon risk, it is critical for investors to prepare for its inevitable impact."

Ecofys is one of the pioneers of carbon pricing research, having worked on the topic for nearly two decades. Kornelis Blok, a science director at the consultancy and a professor at Delft University, said in a statement that Ecofys' would approach the problem from several viewpoints, encompassing policy, industry, investor, and civil society perspectives.

In related news, fresh concerns have been raised over the ability of the EU's beleaguered Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to reduce CO2 in line with the bloc's Paris pledges, the Guardian revealed today.

A confidential note from the European Commission, prepared for MEPs on the environment committee and seen by the Guardian, indicated that the EU is set to emit two billion tonnes more CO2 than it promised at the climate talks in December.

"The current proposals are not consistent with what was agreed in Paris and they are not even in line with what's necessary to stay below 2C," Green MEP Bas Eickhout, who sits on the environment committee, told the newspaper. "What kind of signal is that sending our partners? These Emissions Trading System (ETS) numbers need to be changed now to make them consistent with the Paris agreement."

This article is part of BusinessGreen's Road to Paris hub, hosted in association with PwC.

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