Decarbonising UK industrial clusters: the role of green finance and the risk(s) of lock-in

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:A critical perspective on how green finance frameworks may inadvertently lock in carbon-intensive investments; useful for transition finance and carbon accounting researchers.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability teams should review their financing eligibility criteria to avoid locking in non-transformative projects; consider alignment with lifecycle emissions KPIs.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers designing transition finance taxonomies should incorporate stricter exclusion criteria and independent verification to ensure financed projects deliver absolute emissions reductions.

This study provides a comprehensive examination of financial flows involved in initiating the low-carbon transition of the UK’s industrial clusters. Green finance assumes a pivotal role in mobilising the capital required to underwrite substantial infrastructural modifications to reach climate commitments. Allocation of proceeds is guided by frameworks which influence the criteria for what constitutes ‘best practice’ in financing low-carbon transitions. The concept of what can be perceived as ‘green’ is influenced by the creation and management of these frameworks. Findings indicate that certain principles lay the basis for finance frameworks representing public and corporate green expenditures. These principles pave the way for the financing of projects such as carbon capture enabled gas-fired power stations and energy-from-waste facilities under the premise of ‘pollution prevention and control’. Such facilities can draw criticism of being non-transformative tools of climate mitigation as they perpetuate forms of lock-in via either consistent levels of waste or continued fossil-gas extraction and are thus lower on the mitigation hierarchy than facilities or policy implementation that deliver deeper emissions reductions. We shed light on how financing frameworks are influencing the boundaries of what is deemed eligible for investment and consequently affecting what is considered ‘green’ from a market perspective. We recommend a green finance system capable of delivering deeper mitigation by strengthening eligibility and exclusion criteria to ensure prioritised projects deliver absolute rather than intensity-based emissions reductions; embedding independent second-party verification across all stages of capital raising and expenditure; and aligning KPIs with verifiable lifecycle emissions benchmarks.

• semanticscholar https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2026.1836939/pdffirst seen 2026-07-13 07:10:29