The UK would be able to increase its emissions while still meeting its next legally binding climate goal if the government uses a “surplus” to weaken the target, official advisers warn.
The government has asked the Climate Change Committee (CCC) if it should carry over “surplus” emissions, after the UK overachieved the third “carbon budget” for 2018-2022.
This surplus is equivalent to an extra year’s worth of emissions, so carrying it forward would increase the size of the fourth carbon budget for 2023-2027 by a fifth.
Doing so would make it far easier for the next government to meet that budget, allowing emissions to rise by around 15% from current levels – instead of falling towards net-zero.
In a letter, published today, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) says its “unequivocal” advice is that doing this would place the UK’s future climate goals at “very serious risk” and would make the 2050 net-zero target “more expensive and harder to achieve”.
The letter says that the surplus is largely the result of a sluggish economy and the impact of Covid-19. The committee emphasises that the UK’s emissions cuts need to accelerate to stay on course for long-term goals, rather than slow down.
‘Surplus’ emissions cuts
Under the Climate Change Act, the UK must hit legally binding interim emissions targets, known as carbon budgets, that get gradually lower on a pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Earlier this month, the government published final greenhouse gas emissions figures showing that the UK overachieved in its third carbon budget. Total net emissions were 2,153m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) between 2018 and 2022, the figures show, against a target of 2,544MtCO2e.
This means the UK came in 391MtCO2e – or 15% – below the budget for this five-year period. This “overachievement”, largely due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and other external factors (see below), is equivalent to around one year of UK emissions.
Earlier this month, UK climate minister Graham Stuart asked the CCC for its view on “carrying forward” the emissions “surplus” to the next carbon budget.
Under section 17 of the Climate Change Act, the government is legally entitled to do this if it wishes, but must first seek and take into account the CCC’s advice.
Carrying forward some or all of the surplus effectively weakens the UK’s next carbon budget, by an equivalent amount. Nevertheless, the flexibility was included in the Climate Change Act in order to encourage – and reward – early action to cut emissions.
Five years ago, the CCC issued a similar warning that the UK should not carry forward the surplus from the second carbon budget to the third period, because that overachievement was also largely due to external factors rather than genuine early action.
However, the government ignored the CCC’s advice – the first time it had done so – and carried forward 88MtCO2e into the third carbon budget.
Today, the CCC has once again written to the government warning it not to weaken the fourth carbon budget by making use of surplus emissions.
Indeed, as the chart below shows, making full use of the third budget surplus would allow the UK to legally increase its emissions in the current fourth carbon budget period 2024-2027, rather than cutting them in line with its longer-term goals.
With the third carbon budget surplus of 391MtCO2e being equivalent to a whole extra year of emissions in the UK, the country could emit around 20% more over the five-year budget than the amount officially legislated.
Adding this amount to the fourth carbon budget would enable the UK to emit 200MtCO2e more between 2023-27 than it did over the course of its third carbon budget, following decades of relatively consistent cuts.
This would amount to a 9% increase in emissions between budgets and an increase of as much as 15% from 2022 levels, across the fourth budget period.
It would also push the UK far off course from the government’s own carbon budget delivery plan for meeting near- and long-term targets, which it set out last year.
If the government decides to carry over the surplus and emissions are allowed to rise to their maximum level under a looser fourth carbon budget, getting back on track for the fifth carbon budget would require a “huge and impractical” total emissions reduction of 1,036MtCO2e over the following five years, according to the CCC.
This is twice as fast as anticipated in the government’s plan – and 40% quicker than the most ambitious scenario devised by the CCC.
‘Very serious risk’
In light of these potential outcomes, interim CCC chair Prof Piers Forster writes in his response to Stuart’s request that the surplus should not be used:
“The committee’s unequivocal advice is that surplus emissions from the third carbon budget should not be carried forward.”
The committee warns against “setting conditions that allow for a legally compliant slowdown in progress” when the focus “should be on accelerating and broadening emissions reductions”.
It concludes that both the UK’s domestic goal of the sixth carbon budget for 2033-37 and its 2030 international climate target under the Paris Agreement would be placed at “very serious risk” if the carryover is allowed.
The fourth carbon budget was set when the UK’s 2050 emissions goal was an 80% reduction rather than 100%. This means that the government should be overachieving, rather than underachieving, on the budget’s target emissions reductions in order to stay on a “sensible” track for its future goals, according to the CCC.
The CCC’s response reiterates its previous recommendations to Stuart’s predecessors about carrying forward surplus from the first and second carbon budgets.
Moreover, the committee points out that “most” of the surplus emissions cuts in recent years have not been the result of the government’s climate policies.
According to the committee, roughly half of them resulted from a “tighter than expected” EU ETS cap. This meant “less was required” of government policy in areas outside of the ETS, such as transport and heating buildings.
Most of the remaining surplus is accounted for by “lower-than-expected GDP” and less travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the CCC adds.
The CCC emphasises the need for continued incentives and pressure to make emissions cuts across all sectors, concluding:
“The Climate Change Act and the carbon budgets provide a clear, longrun signal to investors and businesses on the UK’s decarbonisation trajectory. Carrying forward the third carbon budget surplus would weaken this message, causing uncertainty, and could ultimately result in net-zero being more expensive and harder to achieve.”
The post UK emissions could rise by 15% if government uses ‘surplus’ to weaken climate goal, CCC warns appeared first on Carbon Brief.
UK emissions could rise by 15% if government uses ‘surplus’ to weaken climate goal, CCC warns
Transitioning to sustainable practices could boost resilience to compounding geopolitical and climate threats, experts say.
The worldwide fallout from the U.S. war in Iran isn’t limited to gas prices.
Ocean and coastal creatures are being put at risk by the spills, noise, dredging and shipping associated with new offshore oil and gas infrastructure, says a new report by a group of environmental NGOs.
The report by a group of twelve environmental groups analysed planned new offshore oil and gas blocks covering 430,000 square kilometres – an area the size of Sweden – in 11 countries.
Blocks in countries such as Kenya, Indonesia and Australia overlap with some of the planet’s hotspots for marine biodiversity, home to mangroves, coral reefs, sea turtles, sharks and whales.
Oil and gas expansion is advancing in spite of the legal protections already in place, the report says, with a third of the area being licensed overlapping with marine and coastal protected areas.
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“It is alarming to see the research findings and the sheer scale of fossil fuel expansion trajectories threatening the health and future of our shared ocean,” said Tyson Miller, Executive Director of Earth Insight, one of the environmental NGOs involved in the report.
At the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, around 60 countries floated the idea of creating “fossil-fuel-free zones”, which would seek to place limits on coal, oil and gas in areas where development would lead to severe social and environmental harm.
As part of the landmark Kunming-Montreal biodiversity deal, governments have also pledged to protect 30% of the planet’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030. This could be used as an opportunity to limit oil and gas expansion in sensitive areas, Miller said.
The report says the findings “reinforce the need for governments, financial institutions and companies to stop funding and supporting offshore oil and gas expansion”, and calls for the creation of fossil-fuel-free zones in “high-value marine and coastal areas”.
Oil bidding in biodiversity hotspots
As one of the case studies, Kenya — which is set to host the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa later this month — has opened 50 offshore oil and gas blocks for bidding in the Lamu Basin, one of East Africa’s marine biodiversity hotspots.
These blocks overlap with all the region’s mangroves and coral reefs, the report says, which provide nursery habitats for fish, sea turtles and the vulnerable dugong.
These ecosystems are already under severe stress from climate change-related ocean heating and increased water acidity and could now face seismic surveys, offshore drilling, dredging, increased shipping traffic, oil spills, chemical discharge and underwater noise pollution.
The government estimates that oil production will start by 2026, aligning with “global best practices”, and has said the Lamu basin has vast “untapped potential”. The country is expected to open bidding for the first 10 blocks by September.
Muturi wa Kamau, network coordinator for the Kenya Oil and Gas Working Group, said in a statement that the country “is preparing to open ecologically sensitive areas for fossil fuel exploration” while positioning itself as a leader in ocean diplomacy.
“The question is: at what cost are we willing to risk these fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of coastal communities who have depended on them for generations?” Kamau said.
Australia’s Otway Basin
After a four-year pause, Australia — which will act as co-presidency of the COP31 climate summit — resumed offshore exploration in the Otway basin last year, with American energy firm ConocoPhillips among the operators approved for exploratory drilling off the country’s southern coast.
The sites under exploration are as close as one kilometre from a series of marine reserves known as sanctuaries for pygmy blue whales, who travel thousands of kilometres to reproduce in those waters. Orange roughy, a deep-sea fish that can live for over 140 years, may also be harmed.
In total, the report analysed new LNG export projects in Argentina, Alaska, Mexico and Tanzania, as well as expanded offshore oil and gas licensing in Australia, Cameroon, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Norway, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The post Planned offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report appeared first on Climate Home News.
Planned offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report
As competition for minerals needed to produce clean energy technologies intensifies, a growing number of countries have resorted to an age-old mechanism to cope with the threat of scarcity: stockpiling.
The world’s biggest economies are racing to shore up reserves of cobalt, lithium, graphite and rare earths, which are needed to produce batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines and electric systems to wean the global economy off fossil fuels. The same minerals are also increasingly sought after to manufacture military hardware and chips for AI, adding further pressure on supplies.
But the cutthroat scramble to build up reserves threatens to drive up the costs of the energy transition by intensifying competition and pushing up prices of key materials needed to produce clean energy technologies, research published today has found.
“If you undermine the financial viability of [clean energy] projects through higher raw material costs, you’re going to delay their roll-out,” co-author Hugh Miller, the critical minerals lead at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told Climate Home News.
Stockpiling “is happening, whether we like it or not”, said Miller. “But if we’re going to do it, we need to have it in a coordinated manner that means we don’t have massive market volatility and adverse implications from every country trying to go at it alone,” he added.
The rise of stockpiles
A growing number of governments have adopted national stockpiling programmes in response to heightened geopolitical tensions around mineral supply chains.
Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump announced the establishment of a critical mineral reserve known as “Project Vault” to protect American businesses from shortages after China imposed export restrictions on rare earth supplies.
Beijing suspended the measures until November as part of a trade truce with Washington but the episode spooked Western governments and exposed how strategic materials can be weaponised to achieve geopolitical objectives.
Australia, China, the EU and India have also announced measures to create strategic mineral reserves. Japan and South Korea already have long-standing mineral stockpiling programmes.
“Legitimate concerns”
“There are legitimate concerns with regards to potential global shortages of these minerals,” said Miller, citing rapidly rising and concurrent mineral demand for the energy transition, AI, data centres, and military technologies, combined with underinvestment in new supplies for some minerals, such as copper.
While stockpiling can serve as an emergency response mechanism during acute shortages, it does nothing to address the underlying concentration risks in mineral supply chains. The Democratic Republic of Congo holds around 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves, for example, while China dominates the processing of 19 out of 20 minerals deemed critical by a large number of nations.
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Uncoordinated stockpiling programmes risk heightening the price volatility they are designed to hedge against, according to the report.
Researchers found that if Australia, China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea and the US simultaneously built reserves of minerals to cover six months of imports, the aggregate stockpile demand could represent up to 34% of global annual cobalt supply and over 10% of global lithium, graphite and copper supply. That could cause a shock to the market, triggering the shortages and price spikes they are trying to avoid.
Miller said it was unlikely that every country would stockpile at that rate, but aggregate stockpiling demand of just 5% of global mineral supply would have an impact on prices.
Coordinating stockpiles: a role for the IEA?
Researchers found that avoiding the negative impacts of stockpiling requires global coordination over how mineral stocks are accumulated and released – a mechanism which already exists for other commodities, including oil.
Coordination should include agreed rules for countries to build up their stocks over a slow and staggered timeline and pre-agreed conditions for releasing reserves to provide market predictability and reduce the risk of price spikes.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), which was established after the 1970s oil crisis to coordinate emergency oil stock releases among member countries, is best placed to oversee such a mechanism, they say.
Earlier this year, IEA member countries called on the agency to strengthen its work on critical minerals, including by providing support to countries “that choose to establish and expand critical minerals stockpiling systems”.
But Miller and his co-author Pau Morandi, a policy fellow at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise, argue that members should go one step further and mandate the IEA to coordinate the security of supplies, rather than only helping individual governments.
The IEA has been contacted for comment.
A call to action for the G7
Miller said he hoped the research could be picked up by the G7 group of wealthy countries, which could lead on mandating the IEA to take on this coordination role.
France, which is presiding over the group this year and is hosting leaders in Evian on the shores of Lake Geneva in mid-June, has made strengthening the resilience of critical minerals value chains a priority.
In a communique last month, finance ministers agreed to “deepen and expand our cooperation among G7 members and with like-minded partners” to strengthen and diversify critical mineral supply chains and to continue discussions “on how to best organise analytical cooperation”.
Sebastien Treyer, executive director of the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), said he hoped the G7 leaders’ summit can help move the discussion on critical minerals towards greater international cooperation to secure the resources the world needs to build a clean economy.
From inclusive and mutually beneficial partnerships to mine resources to stockpiling minerals, “we need to coordinate more like a trade organisation than something that is about securing supply,” he said.
The post The scramble to stockpile critical minerals could drive up energy transition costs appeared first on Climate Home News.
The scramble to stockpile critical minerals could drive up energy transition costs
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