(AGENPARL) – Sat 15 November 2025 * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *
## * Climate KIC * ## (https://www.climate-kic.org/) * responds to EU’s 2040 climate target, new NDCs and Omnibus vote: “Europe risks undermining its own transition” *
As COP30 reaches its mid-point in Belem, Brazil, ## Climate KIC ## (https://www.climate-kic.org/) warns that the EU’s newly approved 2040 climate target, its new Nationally Determined Contributions, and Omnibus deregulation package threaten to erode Europe’s transition momentum at a critical moment. 
Speaking from Brazil, Climate KIC’s CEO, Kirsten Dunlop cautions that weakened accountability frameworks and carbon offset provisions risk creating disastrous uncertainty for the 6,000+ climate startups it has helped scale across Europe.
* Full statement follows: *
“At ## * Climate KIC * ## (https://www.linkedin.com/company/climate-kic/), we believe that change happening on the ground is the key to realising a just, beautiful, sustainable, climate-resilient world. Our strategy is grounded in learning by doing and deep demonstration: ‘Where there is a way, there is a will’. I am in Brazil at COP30 observing this play out over and over. National negotiations play a vital role in setting the global direction even when, as now, many nations are in retreat, in denial or worse. But change is already happening in cities, in regions, in leading businesses and in bold innovation ecosystems, gathering momentum to shape the future of Europe and the world.The EU’s new 2040 target threatens to erode the work of change on the ground just when it needs to scale. EU Omnibus vote deepens that erosion by hollowing out the EU’s own sustainability framework: weakening due diligence, shrinking reporting obligations and signalling to industry that accountability is optional. These moves create disastrous uncertainty just as Europe’s transition actors are finally building momentum. By integrating domestic carbon removals into the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and allowing 5% of the emissions target to be offset internationally, the new 2040 target doesn’t ‘shield the industry or individual customers’ but rather weakens incentives to decarbonise industry and to adopt solutions we know already exist. 
For the 6,000+ climate startups * * Climate KIC has helped scale across Europe, this is a blow not only to deployment, but to their drive to innovate.Carbon Market Watch estimates the offset provision could lead to 50% more emissions and cost as much as €48.9 billion, burdening EU taxpayers while delaying transition. The message? Polluters can pay their way out, and the clean economy can wait. And with the Omnibus vote sidelining transition planning and weakening liability, it risks sending an even clearer message: Europe is stepping back just when global competitors are accelerating.If Europe does not address climate change, its economies and businesses will be less resilient, which translates into lost jobs, weakened competitiveness and a dysfunctional economy plagued by shocks. 
Undoing key elements of the EU’s sustainability architecture does not lighten the load, it heightens economic risk, at the very moment when we see that the way is there: that the innovations needed, from circular production to new financial flows to local leadership, are ready to scale and poised to drive the kind of sustainable prosperity Europe needs.One of the key reframes of this COP has been to point to NDCs as investment prospectuses. The spectre of 1930s politics in Europe will not breed investor confidence nor make Europe great again.”
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