How to navigate the sustainability tax landscape

Podcast host Susannah Streeter welcomes Cathy Koch, EY Global Sustainability Tax Leader, Alenka Turnsek, EY EMEIA Sustainability Tax Leader and Jesper Solgaard, EY Asia-Pacific Sustainability Tax Leader. Together they discuss how tax functions can help organizations navigate a complex global landscape of environmental taxes and incentives.

With governments publishing their plans to achieve carbon neutrality at COP27, and investors and consumers alike increasingly expecting businesses to follow suit, the stage is set for 2023 to be a year of action.

Turning pledges and promises into meaningful progress, will not be easy, however. It will require leadership from every business function, with tax particularly well-placed to shape sustainable business practice and policy.

In this episode the panel of professionals explore ways the tax function can help organizations navigate a complex global landscape of environmental taxes and incentives, designed to influence corporate behavior and drive down carbon emissions. The latest EY Green Tax Tracker reveals the extent of this complexity with more than 3,700 sustainability incentives (tax credits, grants and loans), 80 carbon pricing initiatives and more than 4,400 environmental taxes in existence globally.

The tax function has a key role to play keeping pace with this evolving landscape, so that it can advise businesses how to take meaningful action on climate change in a way that makes commercial sense, by securing access to valuable incentives and reducing exposure to sustainability taxes.

Key takeaways :

• Carefully review your organization’s exposure to environmental taxes and share this information with relevant business units, so it can put strategies in place to increase sustainability.
• Embed new sustainable systems, processes and technologies into your target operating model.
  
• Harness wider green financing. The EY Green Tax Tracker reports over 3,700 available sustainability incentives in the form of tax credits, grants, loans and others.
  
• Keep the tax function close to operations. The tax function is well advised to work closely with the chief supply chain officer, chief procurement officer and chief operations officer as early as possible.
  

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available. Read the transcript.