A Plan to Decarbonize Europe

Heralded as a new begin­ning in the pur­suit to dras­ti­cally reduce green­house gas emis­sions, the Fitfor55 pack­age has been approved by the gov­ern­ments of the European Union after lengthy and com­plex nego­ti­a­tions.

Initially announced last year, the new pack­age aims to reduce emis­sions within the 27-mem­bers’ block by 55 per­cent by 2030.

The agree­men­t’s more ambi­tious goal is to reduce emis­sion vol­umes over time fur­ther and achieve cli­mate neu­tral­ity by 2050, when the E.U. is seques­ter­ing as many car­bon emis­sions as it pro­duced.

One of the most rel­e­vant aspects of the agree­ment is the so-called LULUCF sec­tor reg­u­la­tions, which include land use, land-use change and forestry, com­pris­ing soils, trees, plants, bio­mass and tim­ber.

The sec­tor will be asked to achieve 310 mega­tons of net car­bon diox­ide removals, which is 15 per­cent more removals than is cur­rently tak­ing place.

“Each mem­ber state will con­tribute a fair share because the ‑310 Mt tar­get will be dis­trib­uted among them based on the recent level of removals or emis­sions and the poten­tial to increase removals fur­ther,” the com­mis­sion wrote in a white paper.

By 2023, the com­mis­sion will also present a pro­posal to limit non-CO2 emis­sions pro­duced by agri­cul­tural activ­i­ties.

“The pro­posed reg­u­la­tion will lead to cli­mate-neu­tral food and bio­mass pro­duc­tion, improve the resilience of forests to cli­mate change, facil­i­tate the restora­tion of degraded ecosys­tems and pro­mote the bio-econ­omy through the use of durable bio-prod­ucts, in full respect of eco­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples fos­ter­ing bio­di­ver­sity,” the com­mis­sion stated.

One of the crit­i­cal deci­sions of the new agree­ment is the cen­tral role attrib­uted by the mem­ber states to the E.U. Emission Trading System (ETS), a car­bon mar­ket set up in 2005 and con­sid­ered by the European Commission to be a cor­ner­stone in the strug­gle against cli­mate change. It aims to com­pen­sate for car­bon emis­sions from energy-inten­sive indus­tries and the power gen­er­a­tion sec­tor.

The core of ETS is a cap and trade prin­ci­ple, where the cap is the max­i­mum amount of emis­sions that an instal­la­tion cov­ered by ETS can pro­duce.

Those instal­la­tions can trade the ETS allowances they might have in excess among them­selves. But, at the end of each year, they risk heavy fines should their allowances not be suf­fi­cient to cover their emis­sions.

The new agree­ment pro­vides a one-time reduc­tion of allowances and fur­ther reduces them by 4.2 per­cent every year.

Approximately 40 per­cent of E.U. power and energy-inten­sive plants cur­rently oper­ate within ETS. By 2030, E.U. gov­ern­ments believe that the sec­tors cov­ered by ETS will have reduced their emis­sions by 61 per­cent.

Sectors not cov­ered by ETS, such as agri­cul­ture, domes­tic mar­itime trans­port, waste and small indus­tries, will be required to slash emis­sions by 40 per­cent com­pared to the 2005 mea­sure­ments. The non-ETS sec­tors are cred­ited for 60 per­cent of the over­all emis­sions within the union.

One of the most con­tro­ver­sial areas of the pack­age is the Social Climate Fund, a €59 bil­lion E.U. fund designed to shield vul­ner­a­ble house­holds from the impact of car­bon costs as prices for build­ings, trans­port, and more will be affected by the new poli­cies.

“The fund will pro­vide finan­cial sup­port to mem­ber states to finance the mea­sures and invest­ments iden­ti­fied in their plans, to increase the energy effi­ciency of build­ings, the ren­o­va­tion of build­ings, the decar­boniza­tion of heat­ing and air-con­di­tion­ing in build­ings and the uptake of zero-emis­sion and low-emis­sion mobil­ity and trans­port, includ­ing mea­sures pro­vid­ing direct income sup­port in a tem­po­rary and lim­ited man­ner,” the E.U. Council wrote.

Other aspects of the agree­ment require cars man­u­fac­tured after 2035 to pro­duce no CO2 emis­sions, while other reg­u­la­tions will push for emis­sions reduc­tion in avi­a­tion and mar­itime ship­ping sec­tors.

The agree­ment is now on the Agenda of the European Parliament, which will dis­cuss the deci­sions of the E.U. gov­ern­ments, pro­pose even­tual mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the pack­age and then vote on the whole project.

“We now have a com­mon posi­tion on these major issues from the Council, from the European Parliament, which will give us the pos­si­bil­ity to start the nego­ti­a­tions with a very short dead­line. And we need that,” Frans Timmermans, European Commission vice-pres­i­dent in charge of the European Green Deal, told EuroNews.

“The world is not wait­ing,” he con­cluded. ​“The cli­mate cri­sis does not wait. The geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenges do not wait, and Europe has to show unity, deter­mi­na­tion, global lead­er­ship.”

• European Council
• European Commission
• EuroNews