Japan missed a UN deadline by submitting its new 2035 emissions reduction target a week late, reportedly because the government had received so many public comments on the 60% cut it proposed – and yet it made no changes in response to overwhelming calls to boost ambition.
The environment minister Keiichiro Asao justified the government’s decision not to strengthen its draft goal for 2035 after a month-long consultation period because arguments raised in the comments were already considered during the policy formulation phase.
“It is very disappointing that the Japanese government ultimately decided to proceed with a
low NDC target, despite claiming its NDC submission was delayed due to reviewing feedback,” said Yoko Mulholland, a senior policy advisor at think-tank E3G.
On February 18, the Japanese government sent in its updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the UN, stating that it aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% from 2013 levels by 2035 and by 73% by 2040, extending its 2030 goal of a 46% cut.
This was despite more than 80% of the 3,000-plus comments the government received calling for higher targets, as Reuters first reported. Japan’s government received criticism from green groups at home and internationally that the proposed targets were not in line with a global goal of keeping global warming to 1.5C.
To make an adequate and fair contribution, Japan should cut emissions at least 81% by 2035 below 2013 levels, according to recent analysis by Climate Action Tracker.
“Instead of heeding the people’s calls for a science-aligned 81% emissions reduction target, [Prime Minister] Ishiba bowed to pressure from fossil fuel interests,” Masayoshi Iyoda, a campaigner for 350.org Japan, said in a statement.
Return to nuclear power
The government of the world’s sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter also finalised its revised energy strategy alongside its NDC. It plans for renewables to account for 40-50% of the country’s electricity mix by fiscal year 2040, with nuclear power contributing another 20%.
The new strategy abandons a previous government stance of reducing dependence on nuclear power as far as possible, following the 2011 tsunami-related meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
Japan’s domestic policies have wide-reaching consequences for the global energy transition.
Its energy strategy maintains an important role for fossil fuels, particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG), with energy demand projected to grow due to artificial intelligence (AI) data centres and new manufacturing plants.
The prospect of Japan importing more LNG, meanwhile, is emboldening countries like the US to proceed with new LNG production, including hopes that it could kickstart a long-delayed $44 billion LNG project in the northern state of Alaska.
Iyoda said Japan’s new climate and energy policies place “false solutions, such as fossil gas, nuclear, ammonia-coal co-firing power, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) at the center of Japan’s climate action without a clear pathway to fossil fuel phaseout”.
Japan also has substantial influence in the Asia-Pacific through its investments in energy-related infrastructure.
The Asia Zero Emission Community, a multilateral forum initiated by former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, is promoting a large number of fossil fuel-related investments across Southeast Asia, and his successor has clearly signalled that the Japanese government will continue to support similar investments under the AZEC framework for the next decade.
Ollie Wilson, head of the Climate Group’s RE100 campaign, said Japan was failing to “seize the opportunity in front of it to become a clean energy frontrunner”, urging it to double down on renewables and adding that its NDC – the fifth from a G20 nation – “falls far short of true climate leadership”.
A linear pathway
Back in 2020, Japan announced its current emissions reduction target of 46% by 2030 compared to 2013 levels, and net zero emissions by 2050.
With the initial UN deadline for 2035 NDCs looming in February this year – which was met by only a dozen countries and has now been extended to September – a committee of Japan’s economy and environment ministries hosted a series of monthly hearings with experts.
During its November 2024 meeting, the proposed new targets were unveiled. With a 60% emissions cut for 2035 and 73% for 2040, they are points on a straight-line trajectory to net zero by 2050.
Presenting the draft goals, an economy ministry official explained “it is crucial for our country to clearly demonstrate its commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, even in the face of uncertainties in emission mitigation technologies and global economic and social conditions.”
The linear pathway, he added, would “enhance predictability in achieving emissions reductions and economic growth simultaneously”.
NDC not 1.5-aligned
When Japan’s environment minister Asao spoke at COP29 in December, he promised Japan would submit “an NDC that is ambitious and consistent with the 1.5 degree goal.”
But environmental groups have argued strongly that the goals Tokyo has set do not help put the world “on track” to limit warming to 1.5C.
The Renewable Energy Institute (REI), a Japanese research organisation, said in a column on the 2035 target, before it was confirmed, that the government was using a flawed interpretation of the IPCC’s latest Sixth Assessment Report. This concluded that global emissions must fall by 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5C.
But instead of using 2019 as a reference year, the government picked 2013 – the year “when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster led to zero reliance on nuclear power, increasing dependence on thermal power generation and causing a sharp rise in emissions”, according to REI.
Choosing 2013 as a baseline for its emissions cuts makes Japan’s climate track record look more impressive than it seems, the think-tank argued. Measured using the IPCC’s 2019 baseline and including natural absorption of carbon dioxide by ecosystems, the 2035 goal of 60% only achieves an actual reduction of about 49%, REI calculated.
“This level of ambition falls short of fulfilling Japan’s responsibilities as a developed nation,” the think-tank said, branding it a “missed opportunity”.
The post Japan disregarded widespread calls to raise its 2035 emissions goal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Japan disregarded widespread calls to raise its 2035 emissions goal
Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.
When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.
Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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