Taxonomies of sustainable investment and existing decision support approaches of EIA, SEA and CBA – a silver bullet for sustainable development? A response to Dusík and Bond

ABSTRACT

In this response to Dusík and Bond, I reflect on what taxonomies of sustainable investment will need to be able to deliver in order to add value to our existing efforts towards making development more environmentally sustainable. What support taxonomies should provide for strategic environmental assessment (SEA) of policies, plans and programmes and environmental impact assessment (EIA) of projects, as well as for cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of policies, plans, programmes and projects is discussed. In this context, I focus on the consideration of climate change and biodiversity as important examples. Exploring a (typical) real-life road infrastructure planning case, I depict some of the existing challenges for SEA and EIA as well as CBA. I conclude that if the use of taxonomies leads to CBA which is not corrupted by powerful (industry) interests and which can result in realistic estimations of costs and benefits as well as to SEA and EIA applications whose results that are not traded-off with alleged economic advantages, they would indeed be highly beneficial.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this context, a legal opinion by Baumann Rechtsanwälte (2021) concluded that the FTPI was unconstitutional, as it does not include an assessment of cumulative environmental and climate change effects and in this context, legal challenges have indeed been launched on a few road projects. Similarly framed legal cases with regards to violations of climate change policy are found elsewhere too, for example, in the UK for the Road Investment Strategy 2 (RIS2), published in 2020 and for which no environmental assessment was conducted (see https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-largest-ever-roads-programme/)