“Multilevel Environmental Risks Regulations in the EU. Optimising the use of Financial Enforcement Tools for Implementation of Climate Policies”

Various proclimate policies implementation instruments within the EU that address the environmental risks can be of legislative, regulatory, or simply financial nature. The range of non-regulatory financial tools that add on to other policy instruments is wide. In general, they can be divided into four groups – incentives, tradable instruments, fines and contractual compensations. The incentives diversity depends on countries specificity, prioritised sustainability areas, size, and character of the funds available. They spread across various subsidies and grants. The tradable instruments can incentivise energy transformations as CO2 and renewable energy- related financial instruments but also motivate to revisit and change existing production processes and technologies to decrease pollution. The fines usually have strong financial components and differ among geographies. There are also widely used environment protecting covenants in agreements introduced by financial institutions. All these instruments differ in terms of their character, reach and efficiency. All of them address the environmental risks and strive to respond to them in an efficient way. There are also other financial instruments conceived to promote proclimate conduct. Examples of them vary from environmental insurance guarantees covering costs of disposal and treatment or removal of wastes, to hedge instruments de-risking market unpredictability in the innovative eco-tech technologies, to venture capital instruments investing in positive impact green projects. These financial tools represent the novelty approach to the challenge of implementation of the climate policies. They contribute to re-shift of approach and help transforming anxiety for climate to actions that protect it. Potential underuse of the multilevel extra-legislatory proclimate tools can be a miss. If financial instruments meant to incentivise climate transformation continue to be exposed to uncontrolled (too-lightly-regulated) speculation, it risks feeding populisms and disintegration sentiments within the EU. The proposed text addresses the research questions that are not limited to analysis of the efficiency of existing policies enforcement tools but also refer to what else could be done to enhance them and make them even more efficient.