Europe is the fastest-warming continent on the planet, yet while citizens are suffering from heatwaves and the forests around them burn in catastrophic wildfires, the European Commission has proposed to weaken its flagship climate policy by allowing polluters to offset a quarter of a billion tonnes of CO2e with risky carbon credits – wasting billions …
Read more “Why integrating carbon credits into the ETS sabotages the EU’s climate ambition”
The EU has a long way to go towards its 2050 net-zero goal, but without getting real about what negative emissions can and cannot do, this goal will be very hard to reach. Our new report, Zeroing in on net-zero, analyses the role of carbon dioxide sequestration and permanent removals in the climate plans of …
Read more “Zeroing in on net-zero: The role of carbon dioxide removals and carbon sequestration in EU member states’ climate planning.”
Launched during a summer of fossil-fuelled climate breakdown marked by heatwaves and wildfires, the European Commission’s carbon market revision backtracks on climate action. The new proposal actively weakens the effectiveness of Europe’s flagship climate policy, and risks undermining the achievement of the EU’s 2040 and 2050 climate targets.
Everybody loves a good design. As the EU prepares national targets for 2040, we will see whether they are designed for real-world climate impact – or just for a clean look hiding messy emissions. In our fresh-off-the-press position paper, Carbon Market Watch sets out what the European Commission needs to keep in mind when designing …
Read more “Position paper: removals in the EU’s post-2030 climate architecture”
29 April 2026 | 10:00-11:30 CET | Online
Carbon Market Watch works, among other topics, on ‘Regulating climate claims and corporate climate responsibility’, but how do we take responsibility for CMW’s own impact on the climate? It has been a gradual effort over several years. Our climate plan sets out how the organisation measures, reduces, and takes responsibility for its greenhouse gas (GHG) …
Read more “Internal climate plan”
Good climate planning is the foundation of effective climate action. But right now, EU Member States’ National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) are falling short, lacking transparency and proper assessments of how permanent carbon dioxide removals (CDR) will actually be deployed to help achieve net zero emissions. The most popular CDR technologies come with real …
Read more “CMW’s feedback on the role of carbon dioxide removals in the Governance Regulation framework.”
Depending on how it is designed, the Commission’s newly proposed EU Buyers Club initiative for carbon removals may contribute little to the green transition or even set it off course. The CO2ol Down project proposes a workable alternative that develops permanent removals while slashing emissions. With the European Union’s recently agreed 2040 climate target setting …
Read more “The EU’s approach to carbon removals won’t remove the climate crisis: lessons from CO2ol Down”
A false equivalence is too often made between carbon emissions and the removals that may balance them. Mistaken ‘like for like’ thinking undermines the integrity of climate policies.
