Renewed concern over direction of EU climate policy in wake of alarming 2024 weather report

Despite the ever increasing body of scientific and real-life evidence for the accelerating pace of global temperature rise, climate campaigners fear the EU executive is looking at ways to introduce loopholes before proposing a target to reduce Europe’s carbon footprint.

Climate campaigners and green groups have urged the European Union to urgently table an overdue bill for a 2040 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target, as a new report confirmed record high temperatures last year in the world’s fastest-heating continent.

The second Commission under president Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly promised to “stay the course” on climate action by following the absolute minimum recommended by the EU’s independent climate science advisory board and proposing a 90% net reduction goal for greenhouse gas emissions.

Backtracking would now mean a major loss of face, but recent signals from Brussels suggest the EU executive is considering allowing governments to use carbon credits from outside the bloc, outsourcing part of their emissions reduction, to meet the target.

“If the European Commission is only going to propose 90%, already less than what’s needed, it should never be looking into loopholes like buying offsets from other countries,” said Michael Sicaud-Clyet, a climate policy specialist at WWF EU.

“That would undermine domestic climate action and set a terrible precedent internationally,” Sicaud-Clyet said after the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) published a joint report with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Green MEP Michael Bloss said Europe’s political appetite for climate action was dwindling even as the continent heats up.

“The EU finally needs a binding climate target: at least a 90% reduction in emissions by 2040, with clear phase-out paths for coal, oil and gas, more speed in the expansion of wind and solar, the dismantling of fossil subsidies and a fair social balance,” the German lawmaker said.

More ‘hot air’

Environmental groups are deeply sceptical about offsetting schemes. Carbon Market Watch (CMW) published last week an analysis of the first such project approved, last month, under the international credit system agreed at the COP29 climate summit in Baku last November.

“These credits are essentially hot air,” said policy director Sam Van den plas, after CMW's analysis suggested the emissions reduction linked to a project to replace wood burner with clean stoves in Myanmar had been overstated by a factor of 27.

“If the EU relies on international carbon credits under the guise of introducing ‘flexibility’ to achieve its 2040 climate target, it risks increasing global emissions," Van den plas said.

But in Germany, with the Greens on their way out of government, the incoming grand coalition of the conservative CDU/CDS and the socialist SPD is pushing for precisely the flexibilities, or loopholes, that the environmentalists are worried about.

The new coalition agreement commits Germany to eliminating its carbon footprint by 2045, five years ahead of the European Union net-zero target date. “We want to remain an industrialised country and become climate neutral,” runs the text of the coalition agreement. It also supports a European net emissions reduction target of 90% by 2040, compared to the 1990 baseline used by the EU.

But there are a couple of important caveats: firstly, the EU’s 2040 target should not require Germany to increase its own 2040 target of 88%. Secondly, governments should be allowed to use carbon credits to cover up to three percentage points of the required emissions reduction.

The conservative European People’s Party, the largest group in the EU parliament has already called for carbon credits to be permitted, with the conservative group’s environment policy coordinator Peter Liese saying last week that Europe must either “go for lower targets or include major flexibilities”.

A ‘problematic fixation’

Liese said the European climate report underlined the importance of “effective climate protection”, but said this must not come at the expense of EU industry and that the Commission's “fixation” on a figure of 90% was “problematic”.

“As far as the EU climate target for 2040 is concerned, the biggest problem is that we have no target at all for the period after 2030,” Liese said. “Other countries such as Japan, the UK and Brazil already set their targets some time ago. China and India, like many others, are waiting for the European Union.”

The European Commission still intends to table a proposal “before the summer”, a spokesperson told reporters on Monday (14 April) - but it is missing from a provisional agenda, published on the same day, which covers weekly meetings of the EU executive until the end of June.