An analysis from Deutsche Bank on the climate policies of 109 countries also reserves critical remarks for USA and UK.

If you are looking for investment opportunities related to climate change, don’t put Italy on top of your list. It is highly unclear which kind of legislation Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s country intends to adopt on climate, just as it has “issues around enforcement”.

Deutsche Bank has digested climate policies of 109 countries to assess the risk for investors. While Italy is labeled most risky, climate related investments in both USA and UK would be of “moderate” risk. Both countries are hampered by a lack of so-called feed-in energy tariffs, which can be used to support development of renewable energy technologies.

“If you’ve got a feed-in tariff, you know what you are dealing with. It is well defined,” Kevin Parker, Deutsche Bank’s global head of Asset Management, tells Reuters.

China and Germany are countries where investors face a low risk.

As a general observation from the study, the policies adopted in individual countries today cannot be expected to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. At best global carbon-dioxide emissions will be 51 billion tons by 2020 – this is five billion tons more than given by science as necessary to achieve the target. Still, without the present policies, emissions would be even higher – 59 billion tons.

One cannot expect the present markets for carbon trade to solve the problem, the analysis points out.

“It (carbon trading) suffers from some big distortions, like the free permits that have been given out. That’s meant investors are so far largely sitting on the sidelines,” Kevin Parker tells Bloomberg.

by Morten Andersen, “Italian climate investments - only for the brave”, COP15 Copenhagen - United Nations Climate Changes Conference Dec 7-18 2009