EU climate targets need more ambition

As the majority shifts to the right, can the Commission still align the EU's 2030-target with the 1.5°C objective?

The June 2024 elections brought us a new, more conservative, European Parliament. The new European Commission will also be relatively conservative, with an even larger share of conservative and liberal party members than in the European Parliament. However, the nomination of Spain’s current progressive climate minister, Teresa Ribera as the Commission’s vice-president overseeing the ecological transition, as well as having responsibility for the EU’s competition policy, is a hopeful sign. Similarly, the nomination of Denmark’s progressive climate minister, Dan Jorgensen, as energy commissioner can be seen as positive, while the nomination of the current climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra from the Netherlands, to remain on this post, as the main conservative watchdog in the Commission’s climate and energy team is probably not so bad. The role of the conservative Swedish former minister Jessika Roswall, nominated as Environment Commissioner is more of an unknown and hopefully she will not become the jammer of the team. The big question will be whether Ribera will be able to shift the EU’s climate ambition into better alignment with the Paris Agreement’s objective to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In order to do that, the EU would need to review its current 2030 and 2050 climate targets and set ambitious targets for 2035 and 2040. Given the growing presence of conservatives and climate delayers in the European Parliament, the European Commission and in EU Member States’ governments, many climate policy advocates seem to be happy with the fact that Von der Leyen in her Political Guidelines for the next European Commission pushed back against calls to lower current targets and supported full implementation of current policies as well as approval of the Commission’s proposal to adopt a new 2040 climate target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.

While it is encouraging that Von der Leyen is not backtracking on previous commitments, despite pressure from a growing number of conservatives in the European Parliament (including some of her own political group) and the European Council (e.g. in Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden), the agreed and proposed 2030, 2040 and 2050 targets are not aligned with the Paris Agreement, and do not reflect the EU’s fair share to global efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C.

The Climate Action Tracker (an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action and measures it against the Paris Agreement commitments) rates the EU’s targets as “Insufficient” (see figure) and states that: “The EU is continuing to fail to contribute its fair share to global climate action, and should adopt at least a 95% reduction by 2040 and substantially increase its climate finance support to countries in the Global South. The EU missed an opportunity to strengthen its 2030 target in its October 2023 NDC submission, despite making a commitment at COP26 to increase it, and despite the signals it made at COP27 that it would increase the 2030 target to 57%.”

Figure: The Climate Action Tracker rates EU’s targets as “Insufficient”

A more stringent approach to fair shares than the one used by the Climate Action Tracker would require the EU to be even more ambitious and would need to see the EU reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions by more than 100% by 2040. This is explained in the Heinrich Böll Stiftung publication “Getting back on track with new EU climate and energy targets for 2035 and 2040”. The study proposes a fair share approach that is based on a combination of domestic emission reduction responsibilities and provision of climate finance by rich to poor countries. The domestic emission reduction responsibilities would then be calculated by dividing the remaining greenhouse gas budget, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), across the world’s population.

If from 2020 onwards all citizens of the world were responsible for the same maximum amount of greenhouse gas emissions, the EU would have a total greenhouse gas budget of 27.5 GtCO2-e for the period 2020 to 2050. To remain within this budget, the EU would need to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030, 82% by 2035 and 92% by 2040, while at the same time substantially improving its land-based ecosystems (in particular forests) so that they can remove more CO2 from the atmosphere, which would then lead to net emission reduction targets of 76% by 2030, 94% by 2035 and 104% by 2040.

While the EU will be discussing its 2035 and 2040 targets in the coming months, keeping in mind that the EU will be expected to submit a new 2035 target to the UN, preferably by March and no later than November 2025, what happens with the 2030 target will be even more important.

The EU’s first 2030 climate target, to reduce emissions by at least 40%, was adopted by the EU’s Heads of State and Government in October 2014, after which the EU developed and adopted the necessary policies by 2018 to ensure implementation of this target. After the 2019 European Parliament elections the new European Commission proposed to change the 2030 target to a combined emissions and removals (or “net”) target of at least 55%, which was approved by EU leaders in December 2020. This decision led to a revision of the recently adopted policies which was finalised in 2023. Despite multiple commitments at COP26 (Glasgow, 2021), COP27 (Sharm El Sheikh, 2022) and COP28 (Dubai, 2023) the EU refused to further review its 2030 target, despite a number of clear opportunities to go beyond what was originally planned. These include:

• the fact that actual emissions in 2020 had been reduced by 32%, well below the agreed target of 20%;
• further efforts to reduce energy consumption and increase energy independence through renewables, inspired by both the COVID epidemic and the Russian aggression against Ukraine;
• the overshoot of the targets enshrined in the European Climate Law (as a result of not counting some of the achievements in increasing land-based removals) and in the REPowerEU proposal.

While the EU still carries an obligation to revise its target and align it with the 1.5°C commitment of the Paris Agreement, even without changing the headline targets, a number of initiatives should be taken to increase the EU’s contribution to the Paris Agreement. These include:

1. all EU Member States should act together to achieve the highest range of all collective climate and energy targets, including land-based removals, energy demand reduction and renewable energy production;
2. the European Commission should ensure all Member States achieve all EU policy-based binding and indicative climate and energy targets and prevent less ambitious Member States from banking on the overachievement of others;
3. Member States should reach the highest levels of their national climate and energy targets, included in their legislation and/or National Energy and Climate Plans;
4. the European Commission and all Member States should take the necessary measures to limit to the maximum the carry-over of unused emission allowances from one year to the other, in both the ETS and ESR; and permanently cancel the maximum level of unused allowances.

The above measures would strongly reduce the EU’s projected greenhouse gas budget for the period 2020 to 2030 from the current projected 27 GtCO2-e and bring emissions closer to the 23 Gt budget that would be considered the maximum budget for this period under 1.5°C aligned pathways.