Submission by the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) regarding the strategy for long-term EU greenhouse gas emissions reductions

Abstract

The EU’s current 80-95% emissions reduction objective for 2050 laid down in the Low-Carbon-2050 Roadmap is an outdated target range and even more problematic, EU’s legally binding 2030 climate policy framework is rated to be far from being sufficient to bring the EU on track with the long-term temperature targets of the Paris Agreement. Now, with the 1.5C-special report of IPCC (IPCC, 2018), the global community has a profound and up-to-date scientific basis for progressive in-depth deliberations on future climate policies at hand. Since the Paris Agreement invites parties to provide their low carbon development strategies by 2020, the European Union is currently preparing its respective mid-century long-term climate strategy. Within a public consultation UBA provided recently its submission on key priorities relevant for the new EU strategy.