Call for experts

Technical Expert Group of the Independent Science-Based Taxonomy

The Observatory Against Greenwashing (OAG) is inviting qualified candidates to apply to serve as Members of the Technical Expert Group of the Independent Science-Based Taxonomy (ISBT) from 18th January 2023 on.

Background

The Secretariat of the OAG is composed of organizations who participated in the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance: WWF, BEUC, ECOS, BirdLife International, Transport&Environment and Chemsec. The Secretariat is responsible for coordination of the ISBT process.

These civil society experts resigned from the Platform in protest at the failure to prevent political interventions in the development of the EU Taxonomy of Sustainable Investment’s criteria. The EU Taxonomy was originally designed to eliminate greenwashing in financial markets and to guide a shift in the European economy towards sustainable investments.

It is legally required to use scientific evidence in the Taxonomy Regulation to define economic activities that are environmentally sustainable. However, due to political interference, the current EU Taxonomy has become unfit to act as a credible guide for sustainable investments: its criteria on gas-fired power, nuclear power, bioenergy, forestry, and plastic manufacturing are being challenged in court for being unscientific.

What is the Independent Science-Based Taxonomy (ISBT)?

The ISBT (see website) aims to succeed where the EU Taxonomy failed: it will create rigorous criteria, which financial institutions can use as a scientific guide for their operations.

The ISBT duplicates the EU Taxonomy’s criteria wherever they are robust and only departs from them when they are scientifically weak or unevidenced.

In these cases, the technical experts behind the ISBT will create new criteria - using the technical recommendations of the TEG or of the official EU Platform wherever relevant.

To highlight scientific and unscientific criteria in the EU Taxonomy, the ISBT uses a traffic light system:

green for robust criteria, amber where there is a need for improvement, and red for unscientific criteria that investors should avoid.

Ultimately, the ISBT aims to become a fully-fledged taxonomy which covers sustainable, intermediate, and unsustainable activities. Criteria for each category will be regularly updated to reflect technological and scientific developments. The ISBT also aims to provide visibility on the future science-based taxonomy criteria, not only the current ones, helping the market to anticipate future updates of the taxonomy criteria and better connecting the taxonomy with available sector-specific 2050 decarbonisation pathways. In short, the ISBT would become what the official EU Taxonomy would have been without political intervention.

Roles and responsibilities of the Technical Expert Group

The Technical Expert Group (TEG) will gather experts in key economic sectors covered by the ISBT, tasked with the following responsibilities:

1/ Contribute to the assessment of existing criteria, and propose where necessary a science based criteria

2/ Assess future EU Taxonomy outputs

3/ Help develop missing technical criteria

The TEG will meet:

1/ At least twice a year

2/ In the month following the publication of Delegated Acts with new technical screening criteria by the European Commission

3/ On an ad-hoc basis related to a specific skill set (for instance to develop criteria on matters yet untouched by the EU Taxonomy or to revise existing criteria).

The members of the TEG shall contribute actively to its work and participate in its above-described meetings. The TEG will report to the Secretariat on the progress of its work and its deliverables (assessments and development of technical criteria for instance).

The mandate of the members of the TEG is two years. For its first phase, the work of the TEG will start in Q2 2023 and will end in Q2 2025.

Required expertise and conditions

Members of the Technical Expert Group need to possess some or all of the following qualifications:

- Technical expertise in various sectors of the economy: Environmental protection and restoration activities, manufacturing, forestry, energy, construction and real estate, information and communication, professional, scientific and technical activities, biomass, finance, transport, water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation;

- Thematic expertise on topics such as biodiversity, circular economy, climate science, climate adaptation, climate mitigation, water, marine, pollution, biodiversity.

The position of member of the Technical Expert Group is currently unremunerated. Extra-budgetary resources will be sought to increase the available budget of the Observatory Against Greenwashing (OAG) in order to provide fees for participation and cover participants’ costs for in-person meetings (travel and subsistence expenses).

Members of the TEG are expected to contribute with a 1-3% Full Time Equivalent (FTE) as a starting point.

TEG members will be listed on the ISBT’s website, and are expected to perform their tasks in an independent manner. To avoid potential conflicts of interests, only candidates working in not for profit institutions, academia or research centers will be considered.

Please indicate your interest for the role in filling out this form by the end of February 2023.

For any questions you may contact Vedran Kordic : vkordic@wwf.eu