EU emissions allowance prices in the context of the ECB’s climate change action plan

In its climate change action plan, the ECB committed to accelerating the development of new models and conducting theoretical and empirical analyses to monitor the implications of climate change and related policies for the economy. As a first step in its detailed roadmap of climate-related actions, the ECB envisages the inclusion of technical assumptions on carbon pricing in Eurosystem/ECB staff projections. Against this backdrop, this box summarises the genesis and basic features of the EU emissions trading system (ETS), the system setting the carbon price in the EU. The EU ETS, which began operating in 2005, is a “cap and trade” system where a cap is set by the EU on the total amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by the activities covered by the system. It has been implemented in “phases” designed to gradually reduce the cap while increasing the scope of the system. In July 2021 a revision of the EU ETS was proposed in the context of the “Fit for 55” package. Meanwhile, the price of emissions allowances traded on the EU ETS has increased from €8 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent at the beginning of 2018 to around €60 more recently. So far, the main impact of changes in emissions allowance prices has been on HICP energy inflation, and, overall, the risk that emissions allowance prices under the current EU ETS may translate into significantly higher headline inflation in the near term appears limited. However, against the backdrop of the ECB’s recently announced action plan, these and other climate change mitigation polices will be further explored with regard to their implications for macroeconomic modelling and monetary policy. JEL Classification: E31, Q43, Q54