Tag: effort sharing regulation

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Commission’s 2030 Climate Target Plan proposes radical changes in the rules governing agricultural and land GHG emissions

In my post in March 2020 on EU climate policy and agriculture, I highlighted the limited expectation among Member States in reporting their projected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the European Environment Agency (EEA) to make significant reductions in agricultural emissions by 2030.

Given the greater climate ambition set out in the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy, I argued that, to properly incentivise, motivate and track progress in the farming sector, a focus on agricultural emissions alone is misleading and should be supplemented by also considering changes in land use emissions and removals that are under the control of farmers. I noted this would require changes in the way that the EEA presents its inventories as well as rethinking the relationship between emissions covered by the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) and emissions and removals in the land sector (land use, land use change and forestry or LULUCF) in EU climate policy.… Read the rest

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Accounting for the LULUCF sector in the EU’s 2030 climate targets

The land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector is assigned an important role in both global and EU climate policy because it is an important store of carbon (around four times as much carbon is stored in soils and biomass including forests as in the atmosphere itself (Lal, 2004) and it is, to date, the only sector with the large-scale potential to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

The Paris Agreement highlights the potential contribution of the LULUCF sector by setting an objective to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century in order to meet its overall goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Under the EU’s climate regime to 2020, the LULUCF sector does not count towards the EU’s domestic 20-20-20 targets.… Read the rest

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Mitigation potential in EU agriculture

In my previous post on this blog, I noted that the Commission’s impact assessment (IA) accompanying its presentation of the new Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) proposal concluded that very little additional agricultural mitigation is expected in the period 2021-2030, over and above what is projected to occur under current policies.

Two possible conclusions might be drawn from this finding. One is that the agricultural sector lobby organisations have used their political clout to ensure that the sector is required to do as little as possible to contribute to the EU’s 2030 climate targets. This reaction was advanced by some NGO activists in response to the post.

The other explanation is that it is difficult (and expensive) to achieve additional agricultural mitigation above and beyond the business as usual scenario. This was the view of the European Council in October 2014 when, in agreeing the EU’s 2030 climate targets, it noted the lower mitigation potential of the agriculture and land use sectors.… Read the rest