EU’s 2040 climate target must face reality of nudging global-warming red line

10 January 2024
By Stefano Porciello

EU policymakers drafting a communication on Europe’s 2040 climate target can hardly ignore the latest threat presented by climate change, or the fact that global temperatures last year got within a whisker of hitting the 1.5 degrees Celsius named in the Paris Agreement.

Yesterday, scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said the average world temperature in 2023 stopped just 0.02°C before the red line — 1.48°C higher than pre-industrial levels — beating “by a large margin” the previous record, set seven years earlier.

“[The year] 2023 was a mere preview of the catastrophic future that awaits if we don’t #ActNow,” the United Nations’ Secretary-General António Guterres commented on X, formerly Twitter. “Leaders must commit to path-breaking #ClimateAction, end the fossil-fuel age — fairly and fast — and invest in helping vulnerable countries combat climate chaos.”

Technically speaking, the aspirational limit mentioned in the Paris Agreement is no way close to being fully broken, because global warming should be calculated as a 20- or 30-year average, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It’s not a day above 1.5 degrees, it’s not a month — or a year — above 1.5 degrees. It’s the long-term average of 20 years — or 10 to 20 years. Given that, if the trajectory is still increasing, then we can say after 10 years that we have exceeded the Paris Agreement limit,” Copernicus’s deputy director Samantha Burgess said at a press conference on Tuesday.

But politics and science metrics differ, and no policymaker can cling to such subtleties. The world almost touched the agreed limit, and EU politicians will be expected to respond accordingly. But will they?

Luckily for most of them, the European Commission seems to have decided to flexibly interpret its legal obligations under the EU climate law. The commission will only issue a non-binding communication on Feb. 6, instead of a fully-fledged legislative proposal to add the new goal to the law.

This means that the commission should hold off proposing a legally binding version of the goal, leaving the work to a new EU executive, which will take office next fall. Hard-law negotiations won’t be needed until then, and politicians would thus be freed from the responsibility of making any difficult decisions while campaigning begins for the EU legislative elections in June.

“With EU elections looming, the temptation will be to temper ambition — or even to backpedal — but we simply cannot afford such stalling,” the non-profit Carbon Market Watch told MLex. “The EU must heighten its ambition and preferably aim to reach climate neutrality by 2040 instead of 2050.”

“It's really very concerning that we’ve almost touched the 1.5°C [limit],” Peter Liese, a prominent center-right European People’s Party lawmaker, told MLex. Europe should intensify work internationally to mitigate climate change, he said.

“The most important point is to [persuade] partners in third countries to increase their efforts and defend our legislation, in particular when it comes to CBAM,” he said referring to the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a tariff making sure certain goods imported from third countries are subject to the same carbon price as European producers.

As to internal climate action, Liese said he’s in favor of ambitious 2040 targets, “but we also need to meet the conditions that the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change mentioned, for example, on negative emissions, biomass and nuclear.”

The board’s recommendations contain no “conditions” on these. But it says that all the scenarios analyzed require large-scale deployment of carbon removal by 2050, and that among three “iconic pathways” identified, the one with the lowest net cumulative emissions “features greater deployment of carbon removals from the land sink, and an increase in the contribution of nuclear power”.

Liese’s comments may well be an anticipation of what powerful center-right lawmakers will push for in the upcoming debate.

No one can predict precisely what temperatures will be recorded in the coming years. But despite possible fluctuations, both the upward historic trends and scientific knowledge of the status of the planet leave practically no chance that global warming will reverse any time soon.

“We are likely to overshoot 1.5 degrees. That’s basic physics of the system and the amount of warming that is locked into the system,” Burgess of Copernicus said at the press conference.

There is no doubt that bold action to stop climate warming is urgently needed at European and global levels. But it remains to be seen whether pro-climate European politicians who pushed for ambitious green policies in recent years will still have enough power to continue the fight after the June elections.

After Copernicus’s data release, the upcoming communication on the EU 2040 target will be key in delivering information and setting the tone of the public debate that will influence the next commission’s proposals on climate action.

“2023. Warmest. Year. Ever,” the commission said on X yesterday. “Climate change affects us all, and we must maintain our ambitious #EUGreenDeal climate goals.”

Actually, it’s time to add the 2040 one too.