Within the Council’s environment working group, discussions are well under way on the proposal for a regulation on the sharing of effort among member states in reducing greenhouse gases in the non-ETS sectors (transport, buildings, agriculture, waste) for the period from 2021 to 2030 – a key part of the summer legislative package implementing the Paris Agreement (see EUROPE 11598).
However, judging from the climate leader board published on Tuesday 28 March by NGOs Carbon Market Watch and Transport & Environment (T&E), only three member states – Sweden leading the way, followed by Germany and France – would seem to be sufficiently ambitious.
By “ambitious” countries, the NGOs mean member states that are prepared to go beyond the proposal, which they feel contains too many loopholes and thus will not allow the EU to do enough to help achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement. This proposal is closely linked to the proposed regulation specifically on land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).
The methodology used by the NGOs to establish their leader board consists of a system of points based on the different elements of the proposal, which are weighted against their importance. The countries’ positions come from public documents, declarations by ministers and also papers submitted to the Council working group.
Sweden comes top of the leader board, with 67 points because its reduction target is higher than the average and it intends to use ETS carbon credits to cover its non-ETS emissions.
At the opposite end of the table, countries like Poland (27th place), Italy, Spain, Czech Republic and others (20th equal) are trying to water down the Commission proposal. Italy, for example, wants to use more forestry offsets and wants to weaken the Commission proposal for the starting point.
Between these two extremes sit a number of countries which are performing poorly, such as Austria (16th) and Finland (11th) – two relatively wealthy countries where forestry is important which are looking to make greater use of forestry credits to offset the increase in their fossil fuel emissions in other sectors rather than reducing these emissions.
Ireland (18th), a largely agricultural country, comes in for criticism because, although it only has to reduce its emissions by 1% by 2030, is still trying to weaken the proposal and stall reduction efforts for another ten years.
“The great majority of countries want to rig the law with loopholes so they can continue business as usual. Either Europe follows the lead of Sweden, Germany and France, which are going in the right direction though not far enough, or we should forget about our climate leadership”, Carlos Calvo Ambel of T&E states bluntly.
The Maltese Presidency is expected to bring forward a first compromise text at the next meeting of the Council working group on 5 May, a diplomatic source has told EUROPE.
In Parliament, rapporteur Gerban-Jan Gerbrandy (ALDE, Netherlands) intends to cut back to only 190 million tonnes the proposed flexibility of 250 million tonnes from the LULUCF sector for the achievement of national targets (see EUROPE 11700). The vote in the environment committee is scheduled for 30 May, ahead of the Environment Council in Luxembourg on 19 June. It is hoped that agreement can be reached on the text before then end of the year.
The rapporteur on the draft LULUCF regulation, Norbert Lins (EPP, Germany) is keen to see greater flexibility to allow more use to be made of forestry credits that result from the sustainable management of existing forests – something the Commission rules out in its proposal (see EUROPE 11751).
The leader board can be viewed online at: https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publications/2017_03_EU_Climate_Leader_Board_policy_brief_final.pdf (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)