The UK should make an international pledge to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 81% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC).
The recommendation for the UK’s next “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) under the Paris Agreement comes just weeks before the government is expected to announce its new target at the COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.
It follows a request from secretary of state Ed Miliband for guidance from the CCC, taking into account the levels of ambition set in the 2033-37 period covered by the “sixth carbon budget”.
Miliband also asked for the committee’s views on the impact of including, or not including, international aviation and shipping emissions. This mirrors the approach taken in 2020 for the UK’s previous NDC.
While the government is not obliged to follow the CCC’s advice, it has almost always done so in the past.
Such a target would be “ambitious, deliverable and consistent” with the UK’s legally binding sixth carbon budget, the CCC notes, providing a “credible contribution” towards limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Existing targets
Under the UK’s Climate Change Act, the government must set a long-term goal for cutting emissions by 2050, as well as five-yearly “carbon budgets” along the way.
The legally binding carbon budgets, detailing allowable levels of economy-wide emissions, are designed to provide “stepping stones” towards the 2050 goal.
When it was passed in 2008, the UK’s target was to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 60% below 1990 levels by 2050, but this was quickly increased to 80%.
The UK’s first five carbon budgets, covering the period from 2008 through to 2032, were set in the context of that 80% by 2050 goal.
However, in 2019, the Conservative prime minister Theresa May raised the UK’s long-term goal to a 100% reduction by 2050, commonly referred to as “net-zero”.
After the UK officially left the European Union in 2020, the increased ambition of the net-zero target provided the context for the UK’s first NDC, which pledges to cut emissions to “at least 68%” below 1990 levels by 2030 – excluding emissions from international aviation and shipping (IAS), in line with UN convention.
(This is more ambitious than the fifth carbon budget target of a 57% reduction between 2028 and 2032, which was set under the lower 80% by 2050 goal.)
Subsequently, in 2021, the Conservative government “enshrined” the UK’s sixth carbon budget in law, targeting a 78% cut in emissions during 2033-2037. This budget was also set in line with the new net-zero target.
In addition, the sixth carbon budget includes the UK’s share of international aviation and shipping for the first time, “in line with the CCC’s long-held view that all UK carbon budgets should account for emissions from both sources”.
The CCC recommends that the budget should be set at 965m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) for the period 2033 to 2037. This equates to, on average, 193MtCO2e annually. In 2019, annual emissions stood at 522MtCO2e.
It evaluated the potential level of the target under different scopes, including noting that changes to the methods it uses for estimating UK emissions could lead to higher estimates for both historical and future emissions. These “higher inventory changes” were taken into account for the 78% target.
If international aviation and shipping are excluded, but the higher inventory changes remain, the CCC’s recommended emissions reduction by 2035, on the basis of 1990, is 82%.
According to independent research group Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the UK’s NDC pledge to reduce emissions by 68% below 1990 levels is “almost sufficient”. It notes that, while the UK’s current target is not consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C, it could be with “moderate improvements”.
CAT had previously rated the target as compatible with 1.5C in 2022, but it has since updated its modelled pathways “to reflect the latest science”. This resulted in more stringent reductions being needed to get on track.
NDC recommendations
The CCC has recommended that the UK’s next NDC commits to reducing territorial emissions by 81% from 1990 to 2035, as shown in the chart below, based on the committee’s forthcoming advice on the seventh carbon budget.
Such a reduction would be consistent with the UK’s existing net-zero-aligned targets: the 2030 NDC; the sixth carbon budget; and net-zero by 2050.
Meeting the 2035 recommendation and the adopted 2030 NDC will require “rapid, but achievable action with low-carbon technologies becoming mainstream”, the CCC states. It points to the 10 recommendations made in its progress report, released earlier this year.
These include making electricity cheaper, reversing policy rollbacks seen under the previous Conservative government and removing planning barriers for technologies, such as heat pumps, EV chargers and onshore wind.
In a statement accompanying the CCC’s letter, Prof Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee, said:
“The technologies needed to achieve it are available, at a competitive price, today. Investment in low-carbon technologies – electric vehicles, heat pumps and renewables – needs to come now for this target to be achievable. Businesses will start to invest when they have confidence in what the government’s long-term policy plans are. We need to see the government’s commitment to climate reflected in the upcoming budget.”
The CCC has provided its NDC recommendation excluding emissions from international aviation and shipping, “in line with UNFCCC convention”, it notes.
If they were included, the committee’s recommendation would sit at 77-78% – almost the same as the level set in the sixth carbon budget.
Most NDCs historically have not included international aviation and shipping. This is consistent with the Paris Agreement, which excluded emissions from these sectors due to the difficulty in attributing emissions to individual countries.
Instead, emissions from these sections are addressed under the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the International Maritime Organisation.
While international aviation and shipping have, therefore, not been included within the CCC’s recommendation for the UK’s 2035 NDC, it notes that the UK is “well-positioned to drive international aviation and shipping decarbonisation”.
Stronger action is “urgently needed” to address international aviation and shipping emissions, the CCC says, which are expected to be the third largest source of emissions in the UK by 2035 and the second by 2050 (after agriculture).
The CCC notes that there have been some accounting changes since the release of the sixth carbon budget. As such, the UK emissions inventory has been revised to lower some estimates for the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
This means that the amount of emissions reduction required to meet the sixth carbon budget is now “slightly smaller” – falling from 78% to 77% as noted above.
This has led to some small differences between the percentage reduction required to meet the legislated sixth carbon budget target and those recommended by the CCC in its advice in 2020, as shown in the table below.
| 2035 UK emissions reduction excluding IAS (NDC basis) |
2035 UK emissions reduction including IAS |
|
| CCC NDC recommendation (based on forthcoming CB7 pathway) |
81% | 77-78% |
| CCC CB6 advice | 82% | 77-78% |
| CB6 legislated basis (comparing annualised legislated CB6 number with latest inventory estimate of 1990 emissions) | 80% | 77% |
Source: CCC analysis.
As such, the CCC’s NDC recommendation for 2035 is 81%, while the sixth carbon budget advice was 82%. The actual amount of emissions reduction does not change, remaining at 965MtCO2e for the period 2033 to 2037.
The delivery plan for the NDC should be aligned with the UK’s international and domestic goals on nature, the CCC adds. It should also be fully integrated with the forthcoming National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Additional advice for the UK’s wider contribution to tackling climate change includes strengthening the UK’s national adaptation programme, supporting climate finance and “championing international transparency” by submitting a best practice NDC technical annex.
The UK should “strengthen and contribute to key international initiatives”, such as the global methane pledge. However, the CCC notes that international credits should not be used to achieve any NDC.
What happens next?
All parties within the Paris Agreement are expected to communicate their NDCs at least 9-12 months ahead of the relevant COPs. For the upcoming 2035 NDC, this means parties must submit their targets between November 2024 and February 2025.
Speaking at the UN general assembly in September, prime minister Keir Starmer said the UK would:
“Meet our net-zero target, backed up with an ambitious NDC at COP29, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C, and we’ll support others to do the same.”
As such, Carbon Brief understands that it is likely Starmer will unveil the UK’s NDC on the first day of COP29 during the leaders summit.
Prof Forster, adds:
“More than any commitment, what we really need is action. I have no doubt that the UK can once again be a leader on the international stage – in both deeds and words.”
Other nations are also likely to publish their NDCs in the coming months, including the US, COP28 host the UAE, COP29 host Azerbaijan and upcoming COP30 host Brazil.
These NDCs will “form the foundation of international climate action”, according to the World Resources Institute. They will be presented and adopted at COP30 in late 2025.
Underlying its NDC advice is the CCC’s work on the seventh carbon budget, its recommendations for which will be published on 26 February 2025. This will cover the period from 2038 to 2042.
The post CCC: UK’s next Paris pledge should commit to ‘81% emissions cut by 2035’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
CCC: UK’s next Paris pledge should commit to ‘81% emissions cut by 2035’
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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