The UK government is to set in law the world’s most ambitious climate change target, cutting emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels.
And, as reported by Sky News earlier, the UK’s Sixth Carbon Budget will incorporate, for the first time, the country’s share of international aviation and shipping emissions.
It will mean an increase in ambition on the international pledge made by the UK government last December to reduce emissions by 68% by 2030.
In line with the recommendation from the independent Climate Change Committee, this Sixth Carbon Budget limits the volume of greenhouse gases emitted over a five-year period from 2033-2037, taking the UK more than three-quarters of the way to reaching net zero by 2050.
This will ensure Britain remains on track to end its contribution to climate change while remaining consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature goal to limit global warming to well below 2°C and pursue efforts towards 1.5°C.
The Paris Climate Agreement commits signatory countries to help limit global warming to well below 2°C, ideally to 1.5°C
The new target will become enshrined in law by the end of June, with legislation setting out the UK government’s commitments laid in Parliament on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the bold move was because he wanted to “continue to raise the bar on tackling climate change” hence “the most ambitious target to cut emissions in the world”.
Nearly a quarter of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines in 2020 – making the country the leader among the G20 for share of power sourced from the renewable energy, a new analysis finds.
The UK also moved away from coal power at a faster rate than any other G20 country from 2015 to 2020, according to the results.
And it ranked second in the G20, behind Germany, for the proportion of electricity sourced from both wind and solar in 2020.
However, Britain is still lagging behind when it comes to fossil gas, according to analysis by the climate and energy think tank Ember.
The country sourced 37 per cent of its electricity from fossil gas in 2020, placing it ninth in the G20 and above the global average of 23 per cent.
“It’s crazy how much wind has grown in the UK and how much it has offset coal, and how it’s starting to eat at gas,” Dave Jones, Ember’s global lead analyst, told The Independent.
But it is important to bear in mind that “we’re only doing a great job by the standards of the rest of the world”, he added.
UK is second behind Germany in G20 for share of electricity sourced from wind and solar (Ember)
Ember’s Global Electricity Review notes that the world’s power sector emissions were two per cent higher in 2020 than in 2015 – the year that countries agreed to slash their greenhouse gas pollution as part of the Paris Agreement.
Power generated from coal fell by a record amount from 2019 to 2020, the analysis finds. However, this decline was greatly facilitated by lockdowns introduced to stop the spread of Covid-19, which stifled electricity demand, the analysts say.
Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels. The UK government hopes to convince all countries to stop building new coal-fired power stations at Cop26, a climate conference that is to be held in Glasgow later this year.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has also called for all countries to end their “deadly addiction to coal”.
At a summit held earlier this month, he described ending the use of coal in electricity generation as the “single most important step” to meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
“There is definitely a concern that, in the pandemic year of 2020, coal hasn’t fallen as fast as it needed to,” said Mr Jones.
“There is concern that, once electricity demand returns, we won’t be seeing that decline in coal anymore.”
The race is on for the business world to figure out how to sustain economic growth and go carbon-free.
The penny seems to be dropping that avoiding climate action comes with financial risks. Last October, 200 of the world’s largest multinational companies said they would achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Among them were Asian companies in sin industries linked with spotty environmental records such as Sinopec and Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL). Chevron, Philip Morris and DuPont were also among those that made pledges.
By 2050, climate change will shrink the global economy by 3 per cent as drought, flooding, crop failure and infrastructure damage become more severe — unless drastic action is taken to bend the curve on global warming, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The Covid-19 pandemic — which has been called a “dress rehearsal” for climate change — has accelerated the urgency to mitigate the impacts of climate change which cost the global economy billions every year.
“Suddenly, corporates have realised that if we’re going for a 1.5 degrees Celsius cap on global warming [the goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change], we have to hit net zero by 2030. It’ll be very expensive to decarbonise any later,” said Malavika Bambawale, Asia Pacific head of sustainability solutions at Engie Impact, a decarbonisation consultancy.
“What is the cost of not decarbonising? That is the question businesses should really be asking themselves.”
Pratima Divgi, director, Hong Kong, Asean, Oceania, CDP
Western businesses have led the way, with the likes of Microsoft saying it will make “the biggest commitment in our history” by removing all of the carbon it has put into the atmosphere since its founding in 1975. Asian companies have been slower to commit. “A lot of Asian companies are further down the supply chain, so they can hide for longer,” says Bambawale.
But climate action in a region that produces more than half of global emissions is cranking up. Of the 1,200 or so firms that have signed up to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which helps companies cut their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, 250 Asian companies have set carbon-cutting targets or are in the process of getting targets approved — a 57 per cent increase between 2019 and 2020. Forty-eight of those 250 firms have aligned their business models with the Paris agreement.
“From a small base, corporate decarbonisation is growing in Asia Pacific,” says Pratima Divgi, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand director at CDP, a carbon disclosure non-proft that co-developed the SBTi. Companies that have signed up to the SBTi include Hong Kong real estate firm Swire Properties, Chinese computer giant Lenovo, and Malaysian textile firm Tai Wah Garments Industry.
National-level policy commitments, like China, Korea and Japan’s net-zero declarations over the past six months have set the tone for Asian corporate decarbonisation. Competition is helping. Australian supermarket chain Coles declared a 2050 net zero target six months after rival Woolworths did the same, and Singaporean real estate firm City Developments Limited (CDL) made a net zero pledge the week after competitor Frasers Property.Gojek and Grab are racing to be the first ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia to declare a decarbonisation target.
“Now that market leaders such as CDL have made net-zero commitments, it will be harder for their competitors to sit and wait,” says Bambawale.
Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas announced in October that it would hit net-zero by 2050, amonth after PetroChina, the region’s largest oil company, said it would be “near-zero” by mid-century.
Aspiration versus reality
But questions hang over how Asia’s big-polluters will realise their declared targets. Ensuring the big emitters share detailed plans and a budget to support their carbon neutral declarations is key for accountability.
PetroChina’s announcement came with “frustratingly little detail”, commented renewables consultancy Wood MacKenzie. The oil giant aims to spendjust 1-2 per cent of its total budget on renewable energy between now and2025. This compares to Italian oil major Eni’s planned 20 per cent of total spend on renewables by 2023 and BP’s 33 per cent by 2030.
Petronas’ own 2050 net-zero pledge is an “aspiration” and not a science-based target that aligns the firm with the Paris Agreement.
“Aspirational targets can only go so far — science-based targets also need to clearly allocate interim short- to medium-term targets to work out what this transformation means to your business and value chain,” says Divgi.
Setting a science-based carbon reduction target takes time. Singapore-based transport firm ComfortDelGro has given itself two years to set science-based goals, but the company avoided giving a carbon reduction timeline in its announcement earlier this month.
Other companies are also being selective with the information they make public. This could be because they do not want to reveal the extent to which they intend on decarbonising, or because they do not have a plan yet. CDL has pledged that it will be net-zero by 2030 — 20 years ahead of competitor Frasers Property — but has declined to give further detail on how it will meet this target.
CDL’s carbon commitment is limited to its wholly-owned assets and developments under its direct control, while Frasers Property is aiming to remove emissions from its entire value chain.
Why carbon dieting is difficult
For major emitters like oil and gas firms, decarbonising means transforming their business model without going out of business. Petronas told Eco-Business that meeting its 2050 target “won’t be easy”, and would require the company to “re-strategise how we do our business, with the focus no longer being on profitability or production capacity alone”.
Petronas plans include hydrocarbon flaring and venting, developing low and zero carbon fuels, capturing emissions and investing in nature-based solutions. It also plans to cap emissions to 49.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent for its Malaysia operations by 2024, and increase renewable energy capacity to 3,000 megawatts by the same year.
Meeting its target would “requires us to strike an equitable balance between providing low carbon solutions while still ensuring energy security and business profitability,” said the company’s group health, safety, security and environment vice-president, Dzafri Sham Ahmad.
But removing the carbon from a company’s operations is no longer deemed enough. The indirect emissions that occur in the entire value chain — known as scope 3 emissions — are becoming the new business imperative. A new report from CDP found that emissions from a company’s supply chain are on average 11.4 times higher than its operational emissions – double previous estimates. ExxonMobil’s scope 3 emissions from the use of its products exceed the national annual emissions of Canada, it was revealed in January.
“Achieving this aspiration will require us to re-strategise how we do our business, with the focus no longer being on profitability or production capacity alone.”
Dzafri Sham Ahmad, vice-president, group health, safety, security and environment, Petronas
Electric vehicle makers such as Telsa are now asking questions about the emissions of their nickel suppliers while computer giant Apple wants to source low-carbon semiconductor chips. But tackling scope 3 emissions is tricky. For instance, how do Singapore construction companies reduce the imported carbon of building materials sourced from China, where electricity is generated from coal? And how does a building owner persuade its tenants to turn down the air-conditioning?
“Reducing scope 3 emissions looks easy enough from the top down. But for people in the field operating the assets it can be a nightmare,” says J. Sarvaiya, an engineer who’s an expert in decarbonisation.
Balancing the carbon books by sourcing renewable energy is also difficult in a region where fossil fuels are still the dominant power source, and where a diversity of regulatory landscapes has made scaling renewables hardand whereprices remain high in places. This has ledAsian companies to focus on reducing energy consumption first, before looking at procuring renewables, notes Bambawale.
But energy capping is not easy in a high-growth region with escalating energy needs. Southeast Asia’s energy consumption is growing by 4 per cent a year — twice the rate of the rest of the world — and much of that demand comes through cooling as global temperatures rise. Some 30 per cent of a business’s energy bill in this region goes on cooling, says Bambawale.
Offset or cut?
Facing so many challenges, it’s tempting for businesses to buy their way to net-zero. Carbon offsets, where companies fund projects that capture or store greenhouse gas emissions to offset their own, are becoming an increasingly popular path to carbon neutrality. Singapore state investor Temasek was one of Asia’s first companies to neutralise the carbon emissions of its operations last year, and did so primarily by buying carbon offsets. Petronas is also relying on offsets as part of its ‘measure, reduce, offset’ net-zero drive.
But offsets are drawing growing scepticism because they enable businesses to carry on as usual, without reducing their actual footprint. “Many companies find that it’s cheaper to reach net-zero by purchasing offsets. It may cost more to replace old technology with more efficient kit than buying offsets,” says Sarvaiya.
Offsets are a necessary piece of the decarbonisation puzzle — but the quality of offset is key, says Bambawale. Companies should ensure that an offset is additional—that is, the carbon reduction would not have happened without the company’s effort. It should also have permanent, rather than temporary, impact. And it should not cause any sort of environmental or social harm. Proving all of that is difficult. “Companies could spend years checking and validating that an offset is actually happening,” says Bambawale.
Offsets will get more problematic the warmer the world gets, Sarvaiya points out. The ability of plants to absorb carbon declines in a warmer world, so more trees will have to be planted to balance the carbon books. Buying renewable energy faces a similar issue. Every one degree increase of surface temperature reduces the efficiency of solar panels by 0.5 per cent.
Companies are also looking to emerging technologies to help them hit carbon goals. In Singapore, concrete producer Pan-United and Keppel Data Centres are part of a consortium that is banking on carbon capture, use and storage technology that won’t be online for another five to10 years to reduce the carbon impact of the city-state’s oil refining, petrochemicals and chemicals sectors.
Heavy-emitting sectors such as steel production, aviation and shipping have high hopes for hydrogen power, which is considered the missing piece of the renewables puzzle. But questions over cost and transportation make hydrogen a fuel for the future for now. “Moonshot ideas should be the last step,” says Bambawale.
Why net-zero is not just hot air
In Southeast Asia, where governments have shown little interest in decarbonising their economies in their post-pandemic recovery plans, there is less incentive for businesses to cut their carbon footprints amid the struggle to stay afloat.
But a wave of commitments to decarbonisation in the past 18 months will likely lead to more. Scores of businesses have signed up for science-based targets during the pandemic, which has played a part in pushing others towards net-zero, says Divgi, adding that a Southeast Asian bank recently committed to SBTi whose suppliers’ emissions were 400 times its own.
Another indicator of interest in corporate climate action is the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), a global framework for companies to disclose the financial risks they face from climate change. CDP has seen a 20 per cent increase in TCFD disclosures in Asia over the last year, Divgi notes.
More companies are trying to assess the financial implications of the transition to a low-carbon economy, and the more progressive companies have recognised that calculating climate risk is not a reporting exercise, it’s a strategic one, says Divgi.
“We’re not saying that it [decarbonising] is without problems. There’s a huge level of transformation involved, but climate change presents both a financial and an existential challenge for many businesses,” she says.
“What is the cost of not decarbonising — that is the question that businesses should really be asking themselves.”
The world’s largest coal mining firm is to “aggressively” pursue solar energy and continue to close smaller mines.
Coal India Limited (CIL) plans to invest in a 3,000 megawatt solar energy project in a joint venture with state-run NLC India.
The company also wants to compete in India’s solar auctions and win projects by offering the lowest prices for clean power.
It marks a major shift for the firm, which produces most of India’s coal.
“Coal as you know, we’re going to lose business in the next two, three decades. Solar will take over (from) coal slowly as a major energy provider in the coming years,” CIL’s chairman Pramod Agarwal said in an interview with Reuters.
The company’s solar project with NLC India will be worth 125bn rupees ($1.73bn ; £1.26bn), with CIL expected to invest roughly half of that figure by 2024.
The group closed 82 mines in the three years to March 2020, and reduced its workforce by 18,600 employees.
Mr Agarwal said he expected further reductions to the workforce, with the savings potentially reinvested into solar wafer production.
Energy transformation
India currently uses about one billion tons of coal annually, making it the world’s second largest consumer behind China.
That’s slightly more than all US coal companies produced in 2019, according to figures from the US Energy Information Agency.
India is hoping for a significant shift in its energy mix over the coming years to help it meet its climate targets.
The country is a signatory to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and it has committed to reducing its emissions by up to 35% by 2030 from 2005 levels.
Last year, the country’s emissions fell for the first time in decades.
Although the lower emissions were partly due to strict Covid-19 lockdown measures, lower demand for coal was also a factor.
India hopes to generate 175GW of renewable energy capacity by next year, with a target of 450GW by the end of the decade.
Both the Paris Agreement and the advancements towards mandatory due diligence have the potential for a huge, transformational effect across our economy.
The climate justice and human rights movements have been on separate paths for far too long. Both have made considerable progress in the past decade, but if we are going to see the type of transformational change that our times require in either, the two must come together.
Recent advancements indicate that this is starting to take place.
The climate movement reached a watershed moment when the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016. Over 196 governments around the world set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, an unprecedented challenge of coordination and action.
They also sent a bold message to actors across all sectors – from finance and business, to civil society and philanthropy – that it was time for action.
For instance, a company’s failure to decarbonise could be seen as contributing to human rights and environmental violations under a mandatory due diligence regime.
Concurrently, the field of business and human rights rapidly accelerated in 2010 when the United Nations endorsed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), a framework to prevent and address the risk of adverse impacts of business activities on human rights.
Governments have been encouraged to translate the UNGPs into national action plans or roadmaps. At the same time, demands on the corporate sector to implement human rights due diligence, a central component of the UNGPs, intensified.
Lawmakers saw an opportunity to recognise the expectation of due diligence behaviour on the part of companies, and governments started legal mandates, including the French Devoir de Vigilance law of 2017, the Dutch Child Labour Law of 2019.
Most recently, the European Parliament indicated through a large majority the likelihood of adopting an EU-wide mandatory due diligence law that would cover human rights and environmental issues.
Both the Paris Agreement and the advancements towards mandatory due diligence have the potential for a huge, transformational effect across our economy.
As governments and the private sector race to decarbonise and minimise their harmful greenhouse gas emissions, legal requirements on mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence are being instituted that can themselves spur this action through incentives and sanctions.
For instance, a company’s failure to decarbonise could be seen as contributing to human rights and environmental violations under a mandatory due diligence regime.
The researcher Chiara Macchi has termed this merger “climate due diligence” and argues it as an emerging notion requiring corporations to assess and address risk, as well as to integrate the climate change dimension into vigilance planning, corporate reporting, external communication and investment decisions.
This concept is being tested in real-time in France. Oil giant Total is being sued by French nonprofit and law firm Sherpa together with 14 French local authorities and four NGOs.
The suit alleges that Total’s failure to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in its operations is a violation of the French Devoir de Vigilance law, France’s seminal legislation that required a duty of care from French companies for human rights and environmental harms.
Sandra Cossart, Sherpa’s Director, said: “This law specifically obliges companies to prevent the risks of human rights and environmental violations caused by their activities, and to do so in an appropriate manner. Total is legally required to identify the risks resulting from its contribution to global warming and to take the necessary measures to reduce its emissions.”
(Editor’s note: After the lawsuit was filed in January last year, Total said it regretted the legal action taken, adding it was working in compliance with national legal standards. The case is ongoing.)
The same French law is also being applied to pursue broader climate justice and just transition issues by representatives of the community of Unión Hidalgo in Mexico. The civil lawsuit against Electricité de France (EDF)’s wind park project focuses on the non-compliance of EDF with its vigilance duties to respect human rights by seeking free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous Union Hidalgo community.
(Editor’s note: The EDF did not respond to a request for comment by the Thomson Reuters Foundation about the lawsuit).
The urgency of addressing the climate crisis is clear, and avenues to accelerate needed transformation in our economy are expanding, including through legal mechanisms like mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence.
If Europe moves to a standardised mandatory due diligence approach with a right of action, this could be an incredible tool to shift momentum on corporations in addressing their greenhouse gas emissions. Two distinct paths, the Paris Agreement and the UNGPs and the resulting momentum towards mandatory human rights due diligence, are indeed converging, and this couldn’t happen soon enough.
Amol Mehra is the Director of Industry Transformation at Laudes Foundation, while Ilan Vuddamalay is a Senior Programme Manager for Labour Rights.
This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate.
The end of 2020 marked the moment, under the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, when nations were supposed to formally submit more ambitious commitments for cutting their emissions.
However, just 45 “parties” (44 countries, plus the EU’s 27 member states viewed as one bloc) met this deadline.
After a year disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, nations representing only around 28 per cent of global emissions registered new or updated “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) on the UN’s official registry by the end of the year.
Some big emitters did register their NDCs in time, including the UK and EU. But major absences included the US, India and China.
Informal consultations at COP25 Madrid. Credit: Kiara Worth | IISD/ENB.
Even among the new submissions, many showed no increase in ambition since the first pledges made five years ago, or even backtracked with scaled-back proposals.
Here, Carbon Brief analyses the various new pledges and how they add up. However, one expert tells Carbon Brief that, while there was reason for hope among the new NDCs, the collective plans are still “totally off” what is required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s global warming targets.
Why were new climate pledges expected in 2020?
Every party that signed up to the Paris Agreement has to commit to a target for cutting its share of global emissions, known as its NDC, every five years.
In the run up to the COP21 climate summit in Paris, most nations had submitted intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), which automatically became their first NDCs unless parties chose to submit updated versions.
A few countries like North Korea and Panama chose to hold off and submit their NDCs after ratifying the Paris Agreement.
According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 190 parties, including the 27 EU member states, have now submitted first NDCs. A handful, including Iran, Iraq and Turkey have yet to do so.
Most of the pledges to reduce emissions within the NDCs were communicated as percentage reductions from a fixed baseline by a fixed year, although some, notably China and India, based theirs on cuts in “emissions intensity of GDP”. To add to the confusion, nations picked different starting points and target years.
Crucially, the initial round of INDCs was not enough to meet the climate targets set out in Paris, a point acknowledged at the time by world leaders.
Estimates suggest they would set the planet on a course for around 3C of warming, rather than the 2C or stretch target of 1.5C that nations had agreed in Paris in 2015.
Now, five years after the Paris Agreement was adopted, countries are obliged to renew and upgrade their NDCs. This is the first test of the “ratchet mechanism” embedded in the agreement, which seeks to scale up the ambition of pledges over time.
The chart below shows the progress some of the world’s major economies have made in cutting emissions from a baseline of 1990 – which is used by the EU and UK.
The coloured dotted lines indicate a linear trajectory of necessary further cuts to meet their NDC targets for 2030. China and India’s GDP-based NDCs are not shown, but the light grey line indicates the progress China, the UK and the EU must make towards their net-zero targets.
Change in greenhouse gas emissions, per cent, from 1990 for a selection of key economies, with rough pathways to NDC (coloured dotted lines) and net-zero (light grey dotted lines) targets based on a simplified and indicative linear trajectory, not actual projections of future emissions pathways. Historical emissions data includes all greenhouse gases and land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), but only goes as far as 2017, which impacts the trajectory of NDC and net-zero targets. Unlike other parties, the US has not submitted a 2030 NDC yet so its pathway only goes to 2025. China and India do not have NDCs expressed as emissions percentage reductions, so their NDC pathways are not included. The EU’s net-zero trajectory is difficult to see as it follows a similar trajectory to its NDC pathway. Source: Climate Watch. Charts made by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
This chart, meanwhile, shows the progress some of the world’s major economies have made in cutting emissions from a baseline of 2005, which is used by the US.
Change in greenhouse gas emissions, per cent, from 2005 for a selection of key economies, with rough pathways to NDC (coloured dotted lines) and net-zero (light grey dotted lines) targets based on a simplified and indicative linear trajectory, not actual projections of future emissions pathways. Historical emissions data includes all greenhouse gases and land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), but only goes as far as 2017, which impacts the trajectory of NDC and net-zero targets. Unlike other parties, the US has not submitted a 2030 NDC yet so its pathway only goes to 2025. China and India do not have NDCs expressed as emissions percentage reductions, so their NDC pathways are not included. The EU’s net-zero trajectory is difficult to see as it follows a similar trajectory to its NDC pathway. Source: Climate Watch. Charts made by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
In line with the Paris Agreement, nations that only set an initial NDC covering the period up to 2025, such as the US, must now produce one that goes to 2030, and those that already contained a 2030 target must “communicate or update” their NDCs.
The agreement also states “the efforts of all parties will represent a progression over time” and will reflect the “highest possible ambition”.
However, as the text does not explicitly require new pledges to be submitted if they already run to 2030, there is room to interpret it as meaning that previous NDCs can be re-communicated. Adopting clearer language on the need for ambition was a contentious topic at COP25 in 2019.
“There is a legal dispute on what is allowed and what is not allowed, Prof Niklas Höhne from Climate Action Tracker (CAT) tells Carbon Brief, adding that nevertheless he sees it clearly:
I would argue that in the last five years, for example, renewables have become much, much cheaper than they were projected five years ago, so the situation is completely different and every country can go back and check whether they can do a little bit more.
Niklas Höhne, founder, Climate Action Tracker
Parties were initially asked in the decision text following the Paris Agreement to inform the UN of their new NDCs nine to twelve months before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow so that the UNFCCC secretariat could prepare a synthesis report based on their contents.
Just three nations representing around 0.1 per cent of the world’s emissions met this deadline.
This “symbolic” date was ultimately delayed after the Covid-19 pandemic led to the COP’s postponement.
Instead, the UNFCCC announced it would publish an initial version of the NDC report by 28 February 2021, based on the NDCs in its registry as of 31 December 2020. The report will then be updated with any new information closer to COP26.
While some nations expressed concerns about their capacity to assemble new NDCs by the end of the year, a letter written in August 2020 by UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa made it clear that the end-of-year deadline was still considered important.
“I strongly encourage Parties to submit their updated or new NDCs in accordance with this timeline,” she wrote.
Which nations have announced new targets?
The table below shows the nations that heeded Espinosa’s advice and made their new announcements by 31 December 2020.
The EU, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Zambia and the UK are the only economies each contributing around 1 per cent or more of global emissions that have announced new targets.
However, as analysis by CAT indicates, some nations that met the deadline merely restated past commitments or made new ones that did not substantially increase ambition. (See section below.)
Many of the first countries to come forward with updated NDCs were small island states and other nations that are highly exposed to climate impacts, but contribute very little to global emissions. The Marshall Islands, for example, submitted its new NDC almost two years earlier than most other parties.
Also included in the table are nations that have indicated an intention to “enhance ambition or action in new or updated NDCs”, as recorded by the WRI’s Climate Watch resource.
This group contains an additional 82 nations, accounting for around 33per cent of total emissions.
Many of these commitments came from an announcement made at COP25 by 103 countries to “enhance ambition of their NDCs by 2020”.
China, the world’s largest emitter, remains the biggest omission from the table, although its leader Xi Jinping announced at a UN climate ambition summit in December that his nation would aim for carbon neutrality by 2060 and scale up its 2030 NDC in line with this. However, China has yet to formally register its new NDC with the UN.
China’s proposed NDC changes include a cut to the CO2 intensity of its GDP by more than 65per cent from 2005 levels, compared to its earlier target of 60-65per cent. While this marks an increase in ambition, it suggests that – in the short term and depending on assumptions about GDP growth – China’s emissions cuts will be modest. (See Carbon Brief’s analysis of China’s new 2030 pledge.)
Meanwhile, the US does not appear in the table above, although president-elect Joe Biden is expected to set out plans for a new NDC after he has taken office later this month and the US re-joins the Paris Agreement.
Other major emitters that have not come forward with new plans include India, Indonesia, Iran, Canada, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Collectively, these six nations contribute around 17per cent of global emissions.
Do the new pledges reflect an increase in ambition?
Submission of a new NDC does not automatically mean a more ambitious commitment and commentators have pointed out that several of the plans released by large countries fall short of what is required.
At the “climate ambition summit” hosted online last month by the UN, UK and France to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, 45 nations came forward with enhanced NDCs.
According to Taryn Fransen, an international climate change policy expert at WRI, there has been a “mixed bag” so far, with the EU and UK in particular taking a “significant step up”.
She notes that a number of Latin American countries have also raised their ambition, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru.
Prof Niklas Höhne from CAT tells Carbon Brief that, while the situation is “much better” than he would have imagined six months ago, “it is still not sufficient”.
We have several countries that have submitted the same thing or even [gone] backwards, so there’s still a lot to do this year…What’s very clear is that we are not a little bit off we are totally off when you add all the different pledges of countries.
Niklas Höhne,founder, Climate Action Tracker
NDCs from major economies have been analysed by CAT to assess whether or not they represent an increase in ambition from previous commitments.
Lower ambition: Brazil and Mexico
Brazil has been the subject of extensive criticism for producing a new NDC that not only fails to raise ambition, but uses an accounting “trick” to make its initial pledge less ambitious.
The nation says it will cut emissions by 43per cent over the next decade compared to 2005 levels, the same as its previous proposal.
However, methodological changes in the emissions inventory since the first pledge was made mean this is now a considerably higher starting point.
The Climate Observatory, a Brazilian NGO, estimates this would mean an additional 400m tonnes of CO2e (MtCO2e) being released in 2030 compared to the original 2015 plan.
As of 2017, Brazil’s total annual emissions were around 1.4bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).
The nation has also mentioned a potential 2060 net-zero goal, but said this is conditional on the payment to Brazil of $10bn per year in climate finance by other countries.
In a critique of the government’s plans, WWF says this request comes “despite [Brazil] being one of the 10 largest economies in the world”.
As a result, CAT has downgraded Brazil’s NDC from “insufficient” for meeting Paris goals to “highly insufficient”. President Jair Bolsonaro was also excluded from the recent climate ambition summit due to his nation’s insufficient plans.
Fransen says Mexico has similarly submitted a new pledge, based on a business-as-usual baseline, that is weaker than its original NDC.
“In the updated NDC they have revised those [baseline] projections upwards which of course means their achieving their target will result in higher 2030 emissions than it would have before,” she says.
The NDC has also got rid of a reference to emissions peaking in 2026.
Lacking ambition: Russia and Vietnam
Russia states in its new NDC that it “demonstrates an increasing ambition compared to earlier commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions”.
Its previous submission from 2019 contained a commitment to cut emissions by between 25-30per cent of 1990 levels by 2030.
The new one pledges to cut emissions by 30per cent. (Russia was one of the last nations to submit a first NDC, having only ratified the Paris Agreement in October 2019.)
But the ambition of this NDC is debatable given Russia’s emissions have already fallen by more than 30per cent since 1990.
Following the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the restructuring of the economy, the nation’s emissions dropped dramatically. But, in recent years, its emissions have been growing.
“[Russia] is basically proposing a target that would be met anyway,” says Höhne. He adds that Vietnam is also using a similar strategy.
According to CAT, Vietnam is set to “vastly overachieve its updated NDC”, as the business-as-usual emissions trajectory it is based on has been “hyper-inflated”, meaning no new policies will be required to achieve it.
Same ambition: Australia, Japan and others
Australia has faced criticism for submitting a “new” NDC without a substantial change to the old one. Therefore, it has been deemed “insufficient” by CAT.
While the new NDC states that it represents a “floor on Australia’s ambition” and that the nation “is aiming to overachieve”, energy minister Angus Taylor has said there are no plans to make a more ambitious pledge in the near future.
Other nations that have similarly made no significant changes include Switzerland and Singapore.
Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, having re-submitted their original NDCs with unchanged targets, have all announced plans to reappraise their submissions in 2021 and come forward with stronger pledges.
For the two east Asian nations, this news comes after their governments revealed plans to aim for net-zero emissions by 2050, commitments that will require new shorter term targets as well.
“I think that is a good sign of the Paris Agreement working…governments feel pressured to say ‘OK we need to do more’,” says Höhne.
How much climate finance has been requested?
Every nation that has signed up to the Paris Agreement is expected to cut its emissions, but there is an expectation that poorer nations will be helped by aid – known as “climate finance” – from richer ones.
Financing climate action is, therefore, an important component of many NDCs.
Reflecting the varying levels of detail in the NDC documents, some parties have provided precise figures for their financial requirements, while others are more vague.
The table below shows explicit mentions of international climate finance requests included in the new round of NDCs, as well as plans for domestic funding. (Carbon Brief produced a similar table of requests for international funds in the first round of NDCs in 2015.)
In the latest round, a total of $373bn in international climate financing has so far been requested by developing nations. A large chunk of this is the $236bn quoted by Ethiopia.
However, as Carbon Brief stressed in its 2015 analysis of finance requests, there are important caveats to consider when looking at the total figure. For example, the types of requests can be very varied and often not directly comparable.
Some NDCs mentioned sums of money, but did not specify whether the funds they required would be sourced domestically or internationally.
Many countries that did not include specific numbers made it clear their targets depended on some level of financial support from other countries.
Nations agreed in 2009 that they would provide climate finance of $100bn a year by 2020, primarily through the UN-backed Green Climate Fund (GCF).
The GCF has often struggled to raise enough money from richer nations. The only country that makes a specific reference to providing money to the fund in the new NDCs is Monaco.
More detail on international financial requirements will likely be revealed as more NDCs emerge in the coming months.
Fransen tells Carbon Brief that a trend she has seen with the latest NDCs is that the sums being requested are “much more robust” than the previous round. “Countries have just had a lot more time to build their capacity,” she says.
This story was published with permission from Carbon Brief.
The easiest way to irritate a senior official in India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is to ask if the government is enhancing its Paris ambition. “Why should we?” everyone from the minister to the joint secretary snaps back. “We’re the only G20 country to have met our Paris commitments. We’ve gone well beyond. Why don’t you ask the countries lecturing us to mend their own ways instead?”
Five years after the landmark Paris Agreement, climate change is gathering pace despite the pandemic-forced hiatus in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Impacts of climate change are already here for all to suffer and pledges to control emissions are still inadequate.
Hope was to be rekindled in 2020, when 195 governments and the European Union were expected to strengthen their pledges at the annual UN climate summit. Covid-19 has forced a one-year delay to that summit scheduled in Glasgow.
Altogether, it has led to shriller demands from rich countries that India – the world’s fourth-highest GHG polluter after China, the US and the EU – should announce the strengthening of its Paris pledges.
This makes the Indian government bristle in private and reiterate in public what India has been doing on the climate front. Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the recent G20 virtual summit how India has the world’s most ambitious renewable energy programme.
“We will meet our goal of 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy (RE) well before the target of 2022. Now, we are taking a big step ahead by seeking to achieve 450 gigawatts by 2030,” he promised.
Installed RE capacity is now around 78 GW, with a similar amount under construction. Observers think installed capacity will reach the 175 GW mark on time, but building of transmission lines is lagging behind.
Environment minister Prakash Javadekar repeatedly points out that international climate analysts have calculated that India is the only major economy on track to stick to pledges made to keep global temperature rise within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
India’s mitigation pledge to reduce intensity of emission per unit of production – rather than reducing the emission itself – has helped. Industrial efficiency improvements were moving the country in that direction anyway.
Javadekar also says often that India is the only big country to add to its green cover in recent years. Most of this addition is not in forests but plantations, which does not help biodiversity.
Ministers and officials point to two initiatives launched by Modi as a sign of new action: the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in 2015 and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) in 2019. After initial hiccups, the ISA has started some work on the ground – especially in training people from other developing countries to set up and maintain solar installations. The CDRI has received backing from most countries, but is yet to make waves.
The Indian government’s position has been strengthened by the latest report card by global climate analysts from Germanwatch, New Climate Institute and Climate Action Network. They place India 10th among the 61 largest economies who were checked to see if they are on track to meet their Paris pledges. China is 33rd and the US last.
Implementing Paris pledges
India recently set up an Apex Committee for Implementation of Paris Agreement (AIPA). Steered by the environment ministry, it has representatives from 14 ministries, in an effort to coordinate climate policies, regulate carbon markets and see how private companies are doing. The ministries include finance, agriculture, science and technology, new and renewable energy, water, power, earth sciences, health, housing and urban affairs, rural development, external affairs, commerce and industry.
As the first implementation period of the pledges made under the Paris agreement starts in 2021, the main job of the committee will be to ensure India sticks to its three promises – a 33-35 per cent reduction in emissions intensity by 2030 from 2005 levels; 40 per cent of all electricity to be generated from non-fossil fuels by 2030; and tree plantation programmes that can remove 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent GHG from the atmosphere.
AIPA will be in charge of providing information to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on India’s progress.
The coal affair
While these steps are unexceptionable, the government gets defensive when asked why India continues to push coal-fired power plants. Not only are they the biggest GHG emitters, they are now costlier than renewable energy for much of the day. Despite that, fresh coal mining figured prominently in the government’s pandemic-recovery economic package.
The only defence one hears is that the coal industry employs millions of people. There has been no move towards encouraging these millions to take up alternate jobs. Some coal-dependent economies – such as Poland – have been seeking a “just transition”.
As host and president of the next climate summit, the British government is going to launch an Energy Transition Council, which will bring together the global political, financial and technical leadership in the power sector, and help to ensure that every country considering the energy transition can access needed support.
But there is no discussion of transition among Indian policymakers. Environmental NGOs in the country have started talking about it, but only a few and only very recently.
Serious problems with wider governance
There is no climate scepticism in India. More frequent and more severe droughts, floods, storms, forest fires, locust attacks have taken care of that. The government’s own scientists have emphasised the need to control GHG emissions.
But that has not stopped the government from seriously weakening environmental protection laws. The prime minister told the G20 summit, “We are encouraging a circular economy.” But the government is now even allowing drilling for oil and mining for coal inside once-protected forests. In the haste for post-Covid economic recovery, green options have been ignored even more than before.
The adverse impacts of such poor governance are worsened by climate change. India may be on track to fulfil its Paris pledge as far as mitigating GHG emissions is concerned, but its misgovernance of natural resources is reducing the resilience of Indians to deal with climate change impacts. Costs of adaptation are going up, and so are the loss and damage the country is suffering.
The dangers of poor governance are known, and were reiterated last year by scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they brought out a special report on the relationship between land degradation and climate change.
The launch of that report was followed by the summit of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, hosted and presided over by India. Its main conclusion was that land has to be saved to fight climate change. India is doing the opposite.
In lieu of a climate summit
While the actual UN climate summit has been postponed, a virtual “climate dialogue” was held recently, leading up to a Climate Ambition Summit on December 12 – the anniversary of the Paris Agreement.
At the dialogue, speakers made it clear that disastrous climate change is in the offing unless all governments take immediate steps. At a session convened by the UNFCCC, scientists also warned that emissions continue to be far higher than what governments pledged in the Paris Agreement, and there is an urgent need for countries to close this gap as well as strengthen their pledges.
Current pledges are leading the world to a temperature increase of anywhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The world is already 1.2 degrees warmer.
The company is among the cohort of We Mean Business Coalition members who first committed to aligning with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C trajectory at COP25 in Madrid last winter. According to the IPCC, global net emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach zero by 2050 if we are to have the best chance of capping the global temperature increase.
CCEP’s new commitments cover emissions from Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (power-related) and Scope 3 (indirect) sources. The company’s main emissions sources aside from operations are ingredients, packaging, transportation and refrigeration.
Given that the majority of the firm’s Scope 3 emissions are in the supply chain, the company is aiming to help all of its strategic suppliers set science-based targets and transition to 100% renewable electricity. For ingredient and packaging-related emissions, the company will accelerate plans relating to sustainable agriculture and 100% recycled plastics. Some life-cycle analyses have found that soft drinks bottles made using 100% post-consumer-recycled plastic generate 40% less CO2e than virgin plastic bottles.
CCEP has earmarked €250m, to be spent over a three-year period, to develop its immediate action plan for meeting its new climate goals. Money will be used to support suppliers, improve efficiency and accelerate R&D around packaging materials.
The company is prioritising reductions over offsetting and has had its targets approved by the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). However, it will be investing in some verified carbon credits “where essential”, prioritising nature-based carbon removal.
CCEP said in a statement that it is ready to go further and faster after reducing value chain emissions by 30.5% since 2010. Its new targets are all baselined for 2019 and the company will develop new interim goals and projects in the coming years.
“We have a responsibility to the communities we serve to keep taking this action on climate,” CCEP’s chief executive Damian Gammell said.
“We know it will be a long and challenging journey – there are no quick fixes or silver bullets – but we are determined to drive this change as fast as we can and to play our part in helping and influencing others. We’ve made significant progress so far, and looking ahead, we will continue to help lead the transition to a low carbon future by putting environmental impact at the heart our decision-making.”
Net-zero movement
As of September, some 1,540 businesses globally had set net-zero targets of some kind, up from 500 in December 2019. That is according to research from Data-Driven EnviroLab and the NewClimate Institute.
But for all the welcome noise on climate leadership in the private sector, there are concerns about how many net-zero targets will be met. A recent poll of 120 sustainability professionals at different companies, conducted by South Pole, found that just one in ten firms with a net-zero vision has an approved science-based targets framework to back it up.
However, the outcome of the tight US Presidential election contest will determine for how long.
Reuters Newsagency reports President Trump’s Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, has promised to rejoin the Paris Agreement if elected.
At the end of vote counting on the day of the Presidential election, neither candidate had a clear victory and the result is likely to remain unclear for at least several days.
“The US withdrawal will leave a gap in our regime, and the global efforts to achieve the goals and ambitions of the Paris Agreement,” said Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Despite the withdrawal, the US still remains a party to the UNFCCC.
Ms Espinosa said the body will be “ready to assist the US in any effort in order to rejoin the Paris Agreement.”
President Trump first announced his intention to withdraw the US from the pact in June 2017, arguing it would undermine the US economy.
However, he was unable to formally do so until now because of the requirements of the deal.
The departure makes the US the only country of 197 signatories to have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, thrashed out in 2015.
In signing up to the Paris Agreement President Barack Obama’s White House had pledged to cut US emissions 26-28 per cent by 2025 from 2005 levels under the deal.
Vice-President Biden is broadly expected to ramp up those goals if elected.
He has promised to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 under a sweeping US$2 trillion plan to transform the economy.
The Rhodium Group said that in 2020, the US will be at around 21 percent below 2005 levels.
It added that under a second Trump administration, it expects US emissions would increase by more than 30 percent through 2035 from 2019 levels.
Most scientists believe the world must cut emissions sharply and quickly in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming.
China, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have recently ramped up their carbon-cutting targets.
UN approves UK and Italian request for high profile Summit to be postponed by a full year, as co-hosts announce new ‘Friends of COP’ advisory board
The UN COP26 Climate Summit has been officially rescheduled for November next year, after the UN approved plans from the UK and Italian co-hosts for the high profile conference to be delayed by a full year in response to the on-going coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this week, the UK government, which had been due to host the Summit in Glasgow this autumn, submitted a request to the UNFCCC climate secretariat for the meeting to be shifted to between the 1st and 12th of November 2021. A shorter delay had been considered, but Ministers concluded the risk of coronavirus outbreaks running into next year in parts of the world justified a longer postponement.
The UNFCCC rubber stamped the decision last night, firing the starting pistol on a 17 month countdown to the crucial Summit where the international community will strive to finalise the rulebook for the Paris Agreement and come forward with new decarbonisation and funding pledges designed to avert potentially catastrophic levels of climate change this century.
COP26 President and UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma welcomed the confirmation of the dates and confirmed the UK was already working on a new “roadmap” designed to accelerate international climate action in the run up to the Summit.
“While we rightly focus on fighting the immediate crisis of the Coronavirus, we must not lose sight of the huge challenges of climate change,” he said in a statement. “With the new dates for COP26 now agreed we are working with our international partners on an ambitious roadmap for global climate action between now and November 2021.”
He also reiterated the government’s plans to make climate action a key plank in its recovery packages. “The steps we take to rebuild our economies will have a profound impact on our societies’ future sustainability, resilience and wellbeing and COP26 can be a moment where the world unites behind a clean resilient recovery,” he said.
Businesses and campaigners broadly welcomed the full year postponement to the Summit, with observers noting how the rescheduled dates mean governments will have clarity over the result of this autumn’s US election and more time to engage world leaders with the need to strengthen their climate strategies.
The UK and Italy are set to host next year’s G7 and G20 Summits ahead of the new COP26 dates, while China is also preparing to reschedule the UN’s Biodiversity COP for next year, providing a series of high profile diplomatic events where climate action will be at the top of the agenda.
Sergio Costa, Italian Minister for the Environment, Land and Sea Protection, said that “between now and November 2021 we will take advantage of every international opportunity to increase ambition and mobilization, also harnessing the G20 under the Italian Presidency and the G7 under the British Presidency”.
The co-hosts also yesterday announced that they have expanded the team of senior figures working on the Summit with the appointment of a new “Friends of COP” advisory board. The group brings together over 25 experts from multiple global sectors to advise the COP26 Presidency, including Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on Climate Action, Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles, and Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, among others.
“Everyone will need to raise their ambitions to tackle climate change and the expertise of the Friends of COP will be important in helping boost climate action across the globe,” said Sharma.
Green groups broadly welcomed the new dates, but also warned governments that urgent action was required now to both drive a green economic recovery and lay the diplomatic foundations for a successful Summit.
The preliminary talks for the conference have faced significant disruption as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and concerns remain that major technical issues relating to carbon market rules, forest protection, and climate financing are all a long way from being resolved. Moreover, campaigners are fearful that a number of governments – with the US and Brazil chief amongst them – are using the cover provided by the coronavirus crisis to drive through new high carbon policies and projects.
“The climate summit can be delayed, but dealing with the climate emergency cannot,” said Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven. “The Covid pandemic has shown just how badly we need international cooperation and political leadership, and the same holds true for tackling the climate crisis.
“The government now has a short window of opportunity to start delivering on the Paris climate agreement. But what is required is action not words, starting at home by delivering a climate-proof economy that supports millions of jobs. Next year’s climate summit will only be a success if major economies use this opportunity to build a green recovery.”
Neil Morisetti, former Foreign Office Special Representative for Climate Change and current Director of Strategy at UCL Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy Department, similarly urged the government to immediately step up its climate diplomacy efforts. “The UK government must use the additional time created by the delay to COP26 to work tirelessly with its international partners in the coming months,” he said. “We cannot postpone climate diplomacy, without which the odds on a successful summit and the resultant elevation of Britain’s global reputation will swiftly recede.”
Meanwhile, Helen Clarkson, CEO at The Climate Group think tank, stressed that governments around the world still have an obligation under the Paris Agreement to submit updated national climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions in the UN jargon, this year.
“The announcement of the new dates for COP26 is very important for the international community, as it focuses minds and provides a clear date fornegotiators,” she said. “However, it is important to remember that the NDC submission timelines have not changed, and countries are still expected to submit updated targets this year. The devastating impact of COVID-19 creates extra challenges, but our networks of businesses and state governments will do all they can to support national governments meet this deadline – climate action must not be delayed.”
Patricia Espinosa, UN climate change executive secretary, said governments now had an opportunity to align their climate efforts with their plans to rescue economies left stricken by the coronavirus crisis.
“Our efforts to address climate change and COVID-19 are not mutually exclusive,” she said. “If done right, the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis can steer us to a more inclusive and sustainable climate path. We honour those who we have lost by working with renewed commitment and continuing to demonstrate leadership and determination in addressing climate change, and building a safe, clean, just and resilient world.”
