The Danish pension sector has called for concrete plans on green investments in its response to yesterday’s government unveiling of a new climate roadmap for achieving the country’s emissions reduction target.

The Danish Ministry of Climate Energy and Utilities yesterday announced the government had decided to speed up major decisions on the road to the country’s target of 70% emissions reduction by 2030.

In a statement, the government department said: “By 2025 all relevant decisions must be in place. The new deadline is underpinned by a concrete policy roadmap consisting of 24 green initiatives.”

Kent Damsgaard, chief executive officer of industry association Insurance & Pension Denmark (IPD), said: “IPD believes that the government’s proposal can be the first important step towards a long-term and concrete climate roadmap for Denmark.”

He added that the greater the clarity the country had surrounding green investments, the better its opportunity was to realise large and important green projects, such as offshore wind turbines, PtX plants and energy equipment.

Citing the Danish Council on Climate Change’s (Klimarådet) 2021 status report on Denmark’s national and global climate efforts, IPD said there was still a need for reduction of approximately 10m tonnes of CO2e by 2030 – which would require very large investments.

“The Climate Council recommends that clarity be created about the green projects as soon as possible to avoid bottlenecks and delays,” the lobby group said.

Damsgaard said: “We already need concrete plans for the expansion of green investments. We hope that the government will enter into a dialogue with us about this.”

IPD said Denmark’s pensions industry had so far invested DKK248bn (€33.4bn) in green technologies, wind turbines and green electricity firms, with DKK87bn of this invested domestically, but added that the pension sector would like to increase this amount if the framework was right – and known.

The IPD CEO said: “We recognise the government’s ambition, but are concerned about whether the plans will come soon enough.”

The lobby group has been calling for a climate roadmap recently, setting out proposals to the country’s government earlier this month on a new climate initiative, calling for a climate fund to be established, as well as a national climate adaptation plan.

Two years ago at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, the Danish government and several of the country’s biggest pension funds made a pledge to invest an additional DKK350bn between then and 2030 to support the green transition – more than twice the amount the sector had already invested and promised to invest at that point.

Since then, the pledge has increased to €65bn, according to IPD.

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