The EU should cut its emissions to 90% below 1990 levels by 2040, according to a new roadmap released by the European Commission.
This will require an expanded and emissions-free power system within 16 years and an 80% reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy, the new guidance states.
The goal is designed to bridge the gap between bloc’s existing short- and long-term emissions reduction targets.
It kicks off a lengthy process in which EU politicians and institutions will grapple over the details of the proposal before it is cemented into law.
The bloc is about to enter a major period of transition as a new European Parliament is due to be elected in June, followed by a new commission, the EU’s executive arm. The result of this could be a surge in opposition towards climate policy as EU politics swings to the right.
The recommendations come as farmers have been taking to the streets across Europe to voice their anger about environmental policies and other matters.
Meanwhile, business leaders are worried about EU industries maintaining their competitiveness against the likes of China and the US as they decarbonise.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief outlines how the commission has tried to deal with these concerns, while also setting out an ambitious strategy that aligns with the EU’s domestic and international climate obligations.
- What has the commission proposed?
- What does it mean for the EU’s next Paris pledge?
- What does it mean for energy, the economy and industry?
- Who is supporting or opposing the target?
- Where did the target come from?
- What does the industrial carbon management strategy say?
- What comes next?
What has the commission proposed?
The European Commission recommends that the EU should cut its “net” emissions to 90% below 1990 levels by 2040.
To meet the goal, emissions would need to fall to “less than” 850m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), while “up to” 400MtCO2e would be removed from the atmosphere using both carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and “land-based” solutions such as tree planting.
Taken together, this would reduce net emissions to 450MtCO2e in 2040, which would be 90% below 1990 levels and 86% below the figure seen in 2022.
The proposal is required under the European climate law. It is an interim target on the way to the EU’s wider goal of achieving a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
It follows the EU’s existing target of cutting emissions by “at least 55%” by 2030. As it stands, the EU is not on track to achieve this target.
Current projections suggest that, even if all planned climate policies are implemented, the bloc’s emissions are set to fall 48% by 2030, rather than 55%. Member states are due to submit updated plans in June that could close this shortfall.
As the chart below shows, adding a new 90% reduction target for 2040 would require even more stringent climate policies, to drive a steeper decline in emissions. Emissions are currently projected to fall 60% by 2040 and 64% by 2050.
In its assessment, the commission details what kind of “enabling policy conditions” would be “necessary” to close the gap to the 90% goal, if it gets formally adopted.
The power sector should approach “full decarbonisation in the second half of the 2030s”, and reach it by 2040, according to the commission. Renewables “complemented by nuclear energy” should generate over 90% of the EU’s electricity by this date, it adds.
With low-carbon electrification driving economy-wide decarbonisation, the share of electricity in the EU’s final energy consumption would double from 25% to 50%, it continues.
The commission says “all zero and low-carbon energy solutions” will be required – including CCS and nuclear – while “solar and wind will make up the vast majority of renewable energy solutions”.
(An earlier leaked draft placed even more emphasis on renewables, stating that “renewables such as solar and wind will make up the vast majority of solutions”.)
The commission impact assessment suggests a very small amount of abated fossil fuels would continue to be used in the power sector in 2040, with gas-fired CCS plants making up 3% of electricity generation – down from the 36% share of fossil-fueled power in 2021.
This inclusion of CCS in the power sector has drawn criticism from some groups. In its assessment of the proposal, Climate Action Tracker stated it was “absolutely not needed in the power sector”.
According to the commission, the rollout of low-carbon electricity would be accompanied by an 80% reduction in the consumption of fossil fuels for energy, including a phase-out of coal and an effective phase-out of unabated gas power, by 2040.
Meanwhile, the use of gas and oil for heat, transport and industry use “should decrease over time in a way that guarantees the EU’s security of supply”.
The commission says that implementing existing measures “will allow emissions to decrease by close to 80% in 2040 relative to 2015” in the transport sector.
A key focus of the recommendations is an “industry decarbonisation deal”. The commission calls for a “firmer and renewed European agenda for sustainable industry and competitiveness” that builds on the Green Deal industrial plan, released last year.
Prominent references to cutting emissions from agriculture – included in leaked draft proposals – have been removed from the commission’s final recommendations.
An earlier draft stated that livestock and fertiliser use would be “core areas” for emissions cuts by 2040, adding that “it should be possible” to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions by “at least” 30% by 2040. The final version includes a vaguer reference to “agricultural activities play[ing] an important role” in achieving the 2040 target.
This change was reportedly a response to recent protests from European farmers that have targeted EU environmental policies, among a long list of concerns.
The decision came under fire from NGOs, with the European Environmental Bureau referring to it as “shortsighted” in light of the sector’s slow progress in cutting emissions.
Other recommendations included an extra 1.5% of GDP being invested annually in the low-carbon transition, compared to 2011-2020. The commission emphasises the need to move subsidies away from fossil fuels and lean on the private sector to “mobilise” funding.
The overarching recommendation from the commission is based on an assessment of three options for the 2040 target – an “up to” 80% emissions reduction, an 85-90% reduction and a 90-95% reduction.
The commission says only aiming for the 90-95% goal would align with official scientific advice, signal a “clear transition path away from fossil fuels as called for by COP28” and avoid “put[ting] at risk the EU’s commitments under the Paris Agreement”. (See: Where did the target come from?)
However, the commission only recommends the lower bound of this 90-95% target. Unlike the 2030 goal, it does not say the EU should be aiming for “at least” a 90% emissions cut.
While all three targets require “similar levels of investment”, the commission says the 90-95% option relies more on “novel low-carbon technologies”, such as CCS. It also requires more raw materials and brings more investment forward to the 2030s, the document notes.
The commission proposals will be subject to approval and negotiation with EU member states and the European Parliament. (See: What comes next?)
What does it mean for the EU’s next Paris pledge?
The 2040 target will also guide the EU’s next international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC).
Parties to the international climate regime are obliged to come forward with more ambitious targets every five years. The deadline for the next round of NDCs is ahead of the COP30 summit at the end of 2025.
This process is supposed to close the gap between existing pledges to cut emissions and the ambition required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.
The EU’s current NDC pledges to cut net emissions to “at least” 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. This aligns with the at least 55% emissions reduction target of the European climate law.
In their next round of NDCs, parties are expected to submit emissions-cutting goals for 2035.
However, the European Commission proposals do not recommend a specific 2035 target. According to the impact statement, only Denmark advocated for an “additional interim target for 2035”.
Instead, the commission says that a new “greenhouse gas figure for the EU in 2035” will be “derived once the 2040 target is agreed”.
In practice, experts tell Carbon Brief, this means drawing a straight line from the 2030 target to the 2040 target and using the middle value as the NDC goal for 2035. (This would amount to roughly a 73% emissions cut by 2035, compared with 1990 levels.)
Ignacio Arróniz Velasco, a senior policy adviser with the thinktank E3G, tells Carbon Brief that the commission sees this as preferable to opening up extra negotiations around an additional climate target for 2035:
“The commission is being careful of this because if they recognise it as an additional target then you can actually have a political conversation about where you put it…It risks becoming the classic thing in which European leaders would probably go head to head and we may lose a lot of political capital discussing that.”
Rather than following a linear emissions path from 2030 to 2040, EU scientific advisers suggested the bloc could front-load its climate ambitions. This would mean faster emissions cuts in the short term, in order to achieve a fairer international transition. (See: Where did the target come from?)
In a press briefing ahead of the target’s launch, Linda Kalcher from thinktank Strategic Perspectives said the EU should be setting an ambitious 2035 target as early as possible, in order to show leadership and encourage other countries to do the same. She stated:
“While the politics of that might be difficult…It’s really important that the Europeans are advancing on it. It might be that we have [US president Donald] Trump again so it would be an even stronger approach by the Europeans to respond to that.”
Another issue is the timeline for the EU’s new climate targets.
The global stocktake text agreed at COP28 calls on all parties to submit their new NDCs “at least nine to 12 months in advance” of COP30. This would mean around the first quarter of 2025, months before the new 2040 target is likely to be legislated (see: What comes next?)
However, according to Kalcher, if EU member state leaders agree on a new target at the European Council meeting in June, then the new NDC could be submitted on that basis. (The last NDC was submitted in a similar way, when the European Council approved the at least 55% target following a European Commission proposal.)
“The EU can move very fast, if it needs to, on issues that seem to inevitably take a long time. If it’s necessary, those processes can be accelerated,” Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), tells Carbon Brief.
What does it mean for energy, the economy and industry?
Reducing emissions in line with the proposed 2040 target would entail investments of €1.5tn a year in the energy and transport sectors, according to the commission.
Overall, it says this would have a minimal impact on EU GDP by mid-century, despite implying “transformations in production and consumption patterns” across the economy. The recommendations notes:
“Growing the economy on the basis of fossil fuels and resource wastage is not sustainable. The EU has shown that climate action and sustaining economic growth go hand in hand by decoupling growth from greenhouse gas emissions.”
In addition, it says investment to meet the 2040 target would avoid €2.4tn in climate-related economic losses during 2031-2050 and cut net costs for fossil fuel imports by €2.8tn over the same period.
Investment in the energy system would need to be close to €660bn (or 3.2% of GDP) per year over the period 2031-2050, while yearly spending on transport would need to be about €870 (or 4.3% of GDP), it states.
This investment would allow energy emissions to reach near-zero by 2040 and transport emissions to drop by 69-78% compared to 2015, shown by the orange and dark grey wedges in the chart below, respectively.
Meanwhile the proposals would see agricultural emissions fall by 30% (yellow), residential and service emissions by 77-85% (light grey) and emissions from industry by 56-84% (blue).
Increasing carbon removals from land-based (green) and industrial sources (red) would bring net emissions down further (dashed black line) and enable net-zero emissions to be reached in 2050, despite ongoing residual emissions in some sectors – notably agriculture.
For the energy sector, the European Commission has called on member states to increase the level of ambition in their national energy and climate plan updates, which are due in June 2024.
For its own part, the commission says it will pursue policies to ensure a fast deployment of renewable energy, as well as zero and low-carbon solutions, and to further development of energy efficiency. It points to initiatives such as the EU Solar PV Alliance and Wind Charter as existing examples of this.
Higher renewable shares will require “substantial” investments in the expansion of the EU’s electricity networks, as well as in upgrading to smarter and more flexible grids, the commission notes.
The recent EU grid action plan is a “first step” in this direction, it continues, the experience from which will allow a “comprehensive masterplan for accelerating the development of the European integrated energy infrastructure”.
By 2040, coal should have been phased out in the energy sector and oil in transport is expected to represent about 60% of the remaining energy uses of fossil fuels. The rest would be gas, used in industry, buildings and the power sector.
As seen in the chart below, final energy consumption from coal (brown) drops to virtually nothing across all three of the scenarios outlined by the European Commission, as well as its LIFE scenario which looks at societal changes to a more sustainable lifestyle.
(The “S1”, “S2” and “S3” scenarios refer to the three different 2040 target ranges considered by the commission. The recommended 90% goal corresponds to S3.)
Overall, fossil fuel consumption falls by 80% in 2040 under the S3 scenario, with oil (red) and gas (yellow) continuing to play a minor role in the energy mix. By 2050, this declines further, with just oil forming part of the mix.
Electricity (blue) grows to dominate the energy mix, with direct use of energy from renewables (green), district heating (orange), hydrogen (pale blue) and “synthetic fuels” (grey), making up the rest of the total.
The gas market structure would have to change significantly, according to the commission, to reflect the increasing role for low-carbon and renewable liquid fuels and gases.
Additionally, gas infrastructure would need to adapt to decentralised production, as some of it is repurposed for “e-fuels”, advanced biofuels and hydrogen
Ultimately, the transition away from fossil fuels will see power prices fall, but investments will be needed to avoid obstacles in some areas having knock-on effects on wider decarbonisation as the economy is electrified, the report continues. It is critical to ensure financing tools are available to support these investments, the commission notes.
The commission emphasises the need for a “just transition that leaves no one behind”. It references the need for measures to support those who are “dependent on carbon-intensive activities”, and says policies could be used to ensure lower-income and middle-income households are protected from steep increases in energy prices in the interim.
In order to ensure the Green Deal “delivers for people”, the commission’s recommendations include investing in reskilling and upskilling of the workforce, support for labour market transitions and targeted income support measures.
The impact of the net-zero transition on employment will vary by sector and region, it says, with those that depend on fossil fuels undergoing a “fundamental transformation”.
EU cohesion policy – an instrument designed to support the “economic diversification and reconversion of impacted territories and communities – will play an essential role in supporting regions most affected by the transition, it notes.
Energy-intensive industry should also be supported, the commission says, allowing it to bridge the transition period when it faces the “dual challenge of investing in clean production methods when available, and coping with high energy prices”.
Concern over the “deindustrialisation” of Europe was raised in the run up to the proposed 2040 climate target.
In January, Euractiv quoted European steel association Eurofer, which stated the 90% target is “possible only if there is the certainty of having access to competitive clean energy in unprecedented quantities, while levelling the playing field with other regions of the world that do not share the same climate ambition”.
At the time, EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told the Financial Times that the bloc must not be “lured” into a “false narrative” that climate action would undermine the competitiveness of business.
He added that despite “significant worries” from industry, he was “absolutely convinced” the EU could continue to have a “world class, second to none, business environment”.
The commission’s recommendations emphasise that a “firmer and renewed European agenda for sustainability industry and competitiveness” would enable a successful transition over the next decade.
It says it will target a conducive regulatory and financing environment to attract investment and production to Europe. The Critical Raw Materials Act, and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation will be key instruments to deliver an “open strategic autonomy”, it adds.
Additionally, the commission says the Net Zero Industry Act – a provision deal on which was also agreed by Council and the European Parliament on 6 February – is a “concrete step”, which covers faster permitting, focused R&D investments and changes to public procurement.
Public investment through both the Recovery and Resilience Facility and InvestEU is expected to mobilise “well-targeted” support for industry, it continues.
The recommendations recognise the global competition that the EU faces, highlighting China’s supply-chain dominance and the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. Europe must remain a “sovereign and resilient economy” throughout the net-zero transition, it notes.
In a statement, Marco Mensink, director general of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) says industry investments will need to be a factor of six higher than today:
“This enormous challenge comes just as industry faces the most severe economic downturn in a decade, demand is falling, and investments move to other regions. With [the] US economy closing its borders, Chinese overcapacity and exports will target Europe even more. Our companies fight against this challenge every day. Sites are being closed, production halted, people let go. Europe needs a business case, urgently”.
One key sector is agriculture. The commission highlights its decision to set up a strategic dialogue on the future of the agriculture sector in order to “jointly shape the transition”.
It is designed to address issues such as viable livelihoods, reducing burdens and ensuring competitive and sustainable food production.
Who is supporting or opposing the target?
Ahead of the European Commission’s new emissions target, numerous countries expressed their support for “ambitious global climate action” in a joint letter from a coalition of countries.
Although it does not specify a percentage reduction, the letter can be interpreted as support for the 90% target, according to Politico.
The letter expresses support for the conclusions of the global stocktake at COP28, stating that it is “crucial” that the EU translates this into “concrete ambitious action to send a strong political signal that the EU will lead by example”.
However, the letter recognises that setting an ambitious target will be a “considerable task” and that there is a need to ensure climate action is an “opportunity for all”.
The letter was signed by Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal.
The recently-elected Polish government has also hinted at support for a 90% goal. In January, Poland’s deputy climate minister Urszula Zielińska, announced that the country would be stepping up its efforts to fight climate change.
She said the EU “absolutely needs to embrace ambitious targets, and we need to embrace the 90% emission reduction target”, Politico reported. She later clarified that this was not Poland’s official position.
Nonetheless, Zielińska’s statement illustrates a major shift for Poland, which has traditionally pushed back against EU climate action. It comes as the country looks to drop lawsuits brought by Poland’s previous governments against EU climate policies, according to Reuters.
Few countries have publicly opposed the 90% proposal. At a meeting of the EU commissioner’s chiefs of staff on 5 February, only the cabinet of Hungarian commissioner Olivér Várhelyi opposed the target, according to Politico.
Strategic Perspectives’ Kalcher tells Carbon Brief that discussions on the matter had been “much more constructive than usual”. While countries did have concerns, “nobody was outright dismissive”. She adds:
“Even the fact that they considered [the 90% target] means that now it’s on the table domestically, and it can’t be dismissed. If you would have asked me two years ago, if people would consider a 90% target, I would have said no.”
In the impact assessment, published alongside the release of the proposed 90% target, the commission notes that most public authorities welcomed the process behind the proposals.
The Danish ministry of climate, energy and utilities firms, the Bavarian state parliament and the UN, among others, all called for an acceleration of the transition.
However, the Polish ministry of climate and environment and the government of Flanders both expressed the view that setting the 2040 target should be postponed, the document notes. (Consultation on the 2040 goal was held last year, before the Polish elections.)
They stated that it was still too uncertain to predict the impact of an EU-wide climate target for 2040, and that the implementation of measures to reach the 2030 target should remain the priority.
While there has been limited pushback from EU member state governments, some political groups within the bloc have taken a more cautious approach to the 90% proposal.
Peter Liese, the chief environmental spokesperson for the centre-right European People’s Party – the largest grouping in the European Parliament – said on 5 February that the group will “consider” the 90% reduction in exchange for other concessions, including dropping a ban on “PFAS forever chemicals”.
In the run up to the release of the commission’s target, there has also been opposition to climate action by far-right and nationalist parties, Irish website the Journal reported. (See: What comes next?).
In addition, farmers have been protesting across Europe about competition from cheaper imports, rising energy costs and environmental rules. (See Carbon Brief’s recent analysis on how these protests relate to climate change.)
A reference to the agricultural sector cutting its emissions by 30% between 2015 and 2040, as part of the 90% goal, was dropped from an earlier draft of the commission’s proposal, according to Politico– reportedly in response to farmers’ protests. (See: What does it mean for energy, the economy and industry?)
Where did the target come from?
The proposed new 2040 climate target is informed by advice from the commission’s official scientific advisers.
Under the 2021 European climate law, a group of scientific advisers known as the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) was established to bring independent research-based analysis to EU policymakers.
In June 2023, the ESABCC released its scientific advice for setting a 2040 climate target, along with a greenhouse gas “budget” for 2030-2050. (The budget is an estimate of how much the bloc can emit over the 20-year period while still being in line with the global ambition to keep warming to 1.5C).
It said that the EU should aim to cut its emissions by a net 90-95% by 2040, compared to 1990 levels. This level of emissions reductions would keep the bloc within a proposed budget of 11-14bn tonnes of CO2e from 2030-2050, as set out in the scientific advice.
To come up with this figure, the ESABCC considered more than 1,000 different pathways for how the EU can reach its longer-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and keep in line with the 1.5C temperature aspiration.
The ESABCC noted there are different pathways that the EU can take to reach its emissions targets. However, these pathways have “common features”, including:
- A phase-out of coal power by 2030.
- A phase-out of “unabated” gas power by 2040.
- A “large-scale deployment” of wind, solar and hydro energy.
- A “substantial decrease” in fossil fuel imports.
- A “considerable decrease” in final energy consumption by 2040, particularly driven by a switch to electric vehicles.
- A “rapid scale-up” of carbon removal techniques.
In addition to assessing how the EU can get to net-zero, the ESABCC also examined how the EU can make a fair contribution to global efforts to reduce emissions, by considering various “equity principles“. Its advice says:
“Under some of these principles, the EU has already exhausted its fair share of the global emissions budget.”
Because “none of the assessed pathways towards climate neutrality fully align with the fair share estimates”, the ESABCC recommended taking “additional measures to account for this shortfall”.
These measures include pursuing the upper range of the 90-95% emissions reduction target for 2040, as well as helping non-EU countries reduce their emissions.
The ESABCC added that the EU could “increase fairness” further by increasing the ambition of its “fit for 55%” pledge, a target to reduce emissions by at least 55% by 2030. The ESABCC said the EU could aim to cut emissions “up to 70% or more by 2030”.
In its analysis of the ESABCC’s advice, the climate thinktank E3G said it represented the “first stress test” for whether the European Commission would fully integrate scientific advice into its policymaking.
In its coverage of the 2040 proposals, Ireland’s the Journal noted that the commission opted for the “lower end of the recommended range” from the ESABCC, by choosing the 90% emissions reduction target.
In a statement, the independent scientific research group Climate Action Tracker said it was “disappointing” that the commission opted for the lower end of what was recommended by its advisers. Mia Moisio, who leads Climate Action Tracker, said:
“[The commission] should increase its 2040 target to at least the recommended 95% reduction.”
What does the industrial carbon management strategy say?
As well as setting out plans for reducing emissions by 90% on 1990 levels by 2040, the European Commission has also released a first-of-its-kind blueprint for how removing CO2 from the atmosphere can help the bloc reach its climate targets.
The commission’s 27-page industrial carbon management communication describes techniques to remove CO2 from the atmosphere as an “an essential complement” to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in coming decades.
Such techniques will be needed to account for sectors where “emissions are particularly difficult or costly to reduce”, the commission says. This includes certain industrial processes that play a large role in the EU’s economy, such as cement production.
The world’s authority in climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said in its most recent assessment of solutions that using CO2 removal in difficult-to-abate sectors is now “unavoidable”, if the world is to meet its climate goals.
However, the failure of CO2 removal technologies to contribute meaningfully to climate action to date and the widespread touting of such techniques by fossil-fuel companies leaves many NGOs wary.
In a statement issued before the industrial carbon management communication was released, 140 NGOs described it as a “smokescreen for continued use of fossil fuels”.
In the Net-zero Industry Act released in 2023, the commission proposed that the EU develop means to remove at least 50MtCO2 per year by 2030.
In the new communication, it says that the EU should capture 280MtCO2 per year by 2040 and 450MtCO2 by 2050. (These figures come from modelling for the impact assessment report for the EU’s 2040 climate target. They represent an average of the “S2” and “S3” scenarios included in this report, representing 2040 targets of 85-90% and 90-95%, respectively.)
The communication notes that “the scale of this endeavour is large”. The target for 2030 would involve removing around the same as the annual emissions of Sweden, it says. The target for 2050 involves removing the equivalent of Italy or France’s annual emissions.
The top chart below, taken from the new communication, shows how the scale of carbon capture should increase from 2030 to 2050, according to the projections.
Dark blue indicates projected CO2 removal from “carbon capture and storage”, a technology where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and stored underground or in the sea. Light blue, meanwhile, indicates projected CO2 removal from “carbon capture and utilisation”, where captured CO2 is used to produce synthetic products, such as fuels and chemicals.
The bottom chart shows projections of where CO2 will be captured from, including industrial process emissions (orange), fossil fuel emissions (grey), biogenic emissions (green) and direct air capture (blue).
The communication says that, until 2030, “the main focus will be on capturing CO2 from process emissions as well as some emissions from fossil and biogenic CO2 sources”.
Process emissions originate from industrial processes involving raw materials, while biogenic emissions result from changes to the natural carbon cycle or from burning biomass.
In a still-emergent technique called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS), biomass is burned with the resultant emissions captured, in theory leading to the net removal of CO2.
Most scenarios for how developed nations can reach their climate goals use large amounts of BECCS. However there are concerns that growing the biomass required would take up large amounts of land that might be needed for nature restoration or food production.
The communication adds that, by 2040, “close to half of the CO2 that is captured annually would have to come from biogenic sources or directly from the atmosphere [through direct air capture]”.
“Direct air capture” is a technology that uses chemical reactions to remove CO2 from the air, as opposed to at the point of emissions. The technology is still in its infancy. Globally, direct air capture currently captures just 0.01MtCO2 per year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
A major barrier to its development is that the technology currently requires very large amounts of energy to run.
The communication notes that rolling out direct air capture will “require significant additional energy to power this energy-intensive process”. It also notes that removing CO2 from biogenic sources (mostly BECCS) will require “the sustainable sourcing of biomass”.
In its reaction to the communication, the climate NGO Carbon Gap “welcomes” the new projections and says they provide “much-needed visibility and predictability on the role of CO2 removal in achieving the EU’s climate goals”.
However, by focusing only on emissions from industrial and biogenic sources or direct air capture, the projections are “missing a whole suite of promising high-durability CO2 removal methods”, it adds. This includes enhanced rock weathering, a technique involving sprinkling rock dust on crop fields in a bid to speed up the natural weathering process, which captures CO2.
From 2030 to 2050, some carbon capture will be used for fossil-fuel emissions, according to the communication’s projections.
The communication says that, despite fossil fuels being rapidly phased out in the EU under the proposals, there will still be some use in the “form of oil in the transport sector and some gas for heating and industrial purposes”.
The wording on fossil fuels differs from an earlier leaked draft of the communication, which said that the power sector is projected to capture 100MtCO2 from fossil fuels and biogenic sources by 2050.
The 100MtCO2 figure was criticised by various groups. This includes the climate and energy NGO Bellona, which said using carbon capture for fossil-fuelled power generation “is both expensive and inefficient, given the breadth of alternative sources of clean electricity”.
Kalcher, from the thinktank Strategic Perspective, also told Carbon Brief she found the 100MtCO2 figure “very worrying”.
To achieve the transformation set out in its projections, the communication says that a “common approach and vision are needed to establish a single market for industrial carbon management solutions”.
It notes there are already policies in place to support development of carbon capture.
This includes the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), the bloc’s “cap and trade” scheme for putting a price on CO2 emissions. The communication says the ETS has “incentivised the capture of CO2 for permanent storage in the EU and the European Economic Area”.
It also includes the Net-zero Industry Act, which “recognises carbon capture and
storage as strategic net-zero technologies and supports project deployment with regulatory
measures, including accelerated permitting procedures”, according to the communication.
But, achieving the EU’s carbon capture goals will require “more ambitious and well-coordinated policies at national level, as well as strategic infrastructure planning at EU level”, the communication says. It adds:
“Achieving this vision of a well-functioning and competitive market for captured CO2 requires partnership with industry and member states, and resources to develop a coherent policy framework that provides regulatory certainty and incentives for investments in carbon capture, storage, use and carbon removals.”
Reacting to the communication, Julia Michalak, EU policy director at the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), said she “welcomes the acknowledgement of carbon trading as a major instrument to deliver net-zero cost-efficiently”, but added:
“However, carbon markets must change to deliver net-zero as the mechanism as we know it will not take us there. It is crucial that the right policy incentives are introduced with greater urgency for removals technologies to develop at scale. This includes the recognition of industrial carbon removals that can be measured with a high level of accuracy under the EU ETS.”
What comes next?
The EU has a complex political timetable this year, which will likely have a significant impact on how smoothly the 2040 target can be adopted.
The European Commission has now issued its initial “communication” with recommendations for the new goal. This launches a process of high-level negotiations among European leaders to reach a final decision on what form the 2040 goal will take.
This will be followed by a period of debate between member states and the European Parliament, which could result in the target being adopted into law towards the end of 2025.
Climate ministers from EU member states will initially be tasked with considering the target and the wider package of climate measures, starting at the next Council of the EU environment meeting on 25 March and followed by another on 17 June.
These discussions will cover not only the headline 2040 target, but also highly political details such as sectoral targets and how to finance the transition.
The council, which represents member state governments, must endorse the new target for it to proceed. The council’s rotating presidency is currently held by Belgium, but Hungary – a nation that has pushed against climate action – is set to take over at the start of July.
Following these ministerial discussions, there is an expectation that a final target will be agreed by member state heads of government – possibly when they meet at the next European Council summit on 27-28 June, observers tell Carbon Brief.
At that summit, leaders will also be discussing the most pressing issues facing the bloc as part of its five-year “strategic agenda”. This does not specifically include climate targets, but covers relevant topics, such as energy and “resilience and competitiveness”.
It would “make a lot of sense” for the European Council to wave the 2040 target through alongside the strategic agenda, Manon Dufour, executive director of E3G Brussels, tells Carbon Brief.
Kalcher, from Strategic Perspectives, agreed, telling a press briefing that this would “inform the work of the next European Commission, and it would be a very good signal to the international level”. However, such a decision would require consensus between leaders and, as Politico noted, “Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán holds veto power”.
Meanwhile, the bloc will also be gearing up for the European Parliament elections, which will be held between 6-9 June.
This will be followed by the election of the new European Commission president and commissioners, which will depend on the make-up of the new parliament. Therefore, the commission charged with putting the proposed target into law could be very different to the one that proposed it.
Discussions around the new target will be taking place at a time of great flux. This may affect member states’ willingness to push ahead with decisions.
Ahead of the European Council summit at the end of June, questions over which coalitions hold the balance of power within the new European Parliament, who the new commission president is and who their commissioners are, will remain open.
It could be that the new commission remains roughly the same as the one that proposed the 2040 target in February, led by Von der Leyen.
However, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) has forecast a “populist right coalition”, consisting of conservatives, Christian democrats and representatives of the “radical right” taking over from the “super grand coalition” of centrist groups that currently dominates parliament. Such a “sharp right turn” could threaten the future of climate policy and the EU “green deal” in general, the ECFR concludes
(According to Politico, even Von der Leyen and climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, both from the centre-right European People’s Party that currently dominates EU politics, have recently faced “rebellion” from within their party over the 2040 target.)
Amid such political uncertainty, the European Council’s approval of the 2040 target could be delayed until the next summit at the end of October, or even the one after that in mid-December. If the latter, it would push the decision past the COP29 climate summit, which could affect the EU’s standing there and its ability to pressure other nations into setting stronger climate targets of their own.
Other external events, including G7 and G20 meetings, and the upcoming US presidential election, could also affect EU leaders’ momentum in setting an ambitious target.
With the approval of member states, the new commission will make an official “legislative proposal” to amend the existing climate law by adding in a 2040 target. (Under the 2021 EU climate legislation, this was meant to happen “within six months” of last year’s COP28 summit, but it is expected to be delayed due to the European Parliament elections.)
This will be followed by a “co-legislation” process where the European Parliament and Council of the EU must agree on the new legislation. This could take several months, meaning the final outcome might emerge close to COP30 at the end of 2025.
Key dates for EU climate politics in 2024 can be seen in the calendar below.
| 6 February | European Commission releases its 2040 climate “communication” |
| 21-22 March | European Council summit |
| 25 March | Environment Council of the EU Council meeting |
| 26 March | “Climate high level” meeting between EU climate ministers |
| 19-21 May | G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan |
| 6-9 June | European Parliament elections |
| 17 June | Environment Council of the EU Council meeting |
| 27-28 June | European Council summit |
| June-July | European Council proposes the next European Commission president candidate |
| 1 July | Hungary takes over the EU Council presidency from Belgium |
| Mid-July | Election of new European Commission president in the European Parliament |
| September | Hearings of new commissioners in European Parliament committees |
| November | New European Commission is confirmed and starts its term in office |
| 5 November | US presidential election |
| 11-24 November | COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan |
| 18-19 November | G20 summit, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
The post Q&A: European Commission calls for 90% cut in EU emissions by 2040 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: European Commission calls for 90% cut in EU emissions by 2040
Climate Change
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
What happened?
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:
“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”
The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.
Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
On social media, Rohde stated:
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
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The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
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The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
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Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
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For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
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A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
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In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
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