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In a bid to stop the planet heating, the European Union made a promise in 2019 to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
Despite a pandemic, war and energy crisis, European lawmakers are still pushing for policies to cut pollution.
They have written some targets from the European Green Deal into law and are haggling over others. They have added green strings to coronavirus relief packages and ripped up rules blocking clean energy projects. “Covid didn’t kill the Green Deal,” said Pieter de Pous, a Berlin-based analyst at climate think tank E3G. “In fact, it made it stronger.”
If Europe can clean up its economy, it could serve as a blueprint to polluters from the US to China – and show countries across Africa and Asia that one of the richest emitters is serious about stopping climate change. But how close is the EU to reaching its targets? And how much further does it have to go?
Together with media partners in the European Data Journalism Network, DW is tracking the bloc’s progress in five key sectors. This article will be updated regularly as new data becomes available.
EMISSIONS: Cutting greenhouse gas pollution
The EU has cut its yearly greenhouse gas pollution by about 30% since 1990, mainly by burning less coal. It now wants to cut greenhouse gas pollution 57% from those levels by the end of the decade.
“The honest truth is that the world is not on track to keep the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” said European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, architect of the Green Deal, announcing the updated goal at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November. “We need more ambition.”
But the new target, which is only slightly more ambitious than the original Green Deal of 55%, falls short of cuts needed to honor the promise of keeping global warming to 1.5 C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Climate Action Tracker, a project from two environmental research organizations, found emissions would have to fall at least a further five percentage points, by a total of more than 62%.
Current policies from member states look set to bring down emissions by just 36-47%.
POWER: More renewable energy
The EU gets 22% of its energy from renewable sources. Last year, it put forward a plan to hit 40% by the end of the decade. Then, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Commission said it wanted to increase that again to 45%. The target implies a quick and strong push to electrify polluting activities and clean up the continent’s electricity grid.
The proposal has passed two rounds of legal bureaucracy but must still be agreed on by member states, who want to keep the target at 40%.
Europe has scrambled for sources of energy to replace gas since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and shut pipelines. Countries like Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, have restarted coal-fired power plants, signed decade-long deals with gas producers in Africa and the Middle East, and built terminals to receive shipments of liquefied natural gas from abroad. At the same time, it and other EU member states have promised to build more renewable sources of energy and make it easier for companies to do so.
While analysts expect a spike in pollution from burning more coal, they are more worried about the plans to build new fossil gas infrastructure, which could lock-in pollution over decades. That could jeopardize the goal of using 45% green power by 2030.
POWER: Making electricity from solar panels and wind turbines
The industry expects the EU to build 220 GW of solar power and 92 GW of wind power in the next four years, aided by the falling price of renewable energy. This is more than the amount expected in some scenarios that keep global warming to 1.5 °C, according to the London-based climate think tank Ember, which modeled pathways to reach the target.
“To get out of this crisis, we need a massive influx of home-grown, reliable renewable energy,” said Harriet Fox, a solar analyst at Ember. “If the EU is serious about deploying renewable energy, there’s no reason why those industry targets can’t be achieved.”
The outlook from the wind industry is less optimistic than solar because of the long time it takes to get permits approved and wind farms built. In November 2022, EU member states agreed to shorten the timeframes for granting permits. This means they can skip some of the paperwork to assess a project’s environmental impact, speeding up the time between planning and building.
BUILDINGS: Heating homes without burning gas
The EU also wants to renovate more buildings and run them on 49% renewable energy by 2030. In a proposal, the European Commission has argued for putting solar panels on new public and commercial buildings from 2027 and on existing ones from 2028. It wants to do the same for new residential buildings from 2030.
As well as building infrastructure to make clean energy, the EU would also have to electrify activities that run on fossil fuels – like burning gas to heat a home. One of the most effective ways to do so is swapping gas boilers for electric heat pumps.
Modeling from the European Commission shows the amount of heat generated by heat pumps running on renewable electricity would have to roughly triple by the end of the decade. A preliminary analysis from the Regulatory Assistance Project, a global nonprofit working to decarbonize buildings, found it would need to almost double the pace of installations. While high gas prices have sent demand for heat pumps soaring, a lack of trained installers has held back the shift.
“The European Green Deal has made significant legislative strides in 2022 which are not yet captured and reflected in the data available, hence the need to build a comprehensive Green deal dashboard which we are working on at OFCE and hope to present early 2024”, says French environmental economist Eloi Laurent. “At the same time”, he adds, “the European Green Deal is also running against renewed political opposition, precisely because of its recent acceleration: that some European leaders are calling for a pause is a testimony to significant progress.”
TRANSPORT: Driving cars without burning petrol
The European Commission wants to cut the average CO2 emissions from new cars 55% by 2030, before hitting zero by 2035. That would be one of the easiest fixes to clean up transport, the only sector where pollution has steadily risen. Greenhouse gas emissions were 15% higher in 2021 than 1990.
Some member states, including Germany and Italy, have pushed back against the target.
Experts say the target is achievable, if unambitious. Electric vehicle sales are picking up. The share of electrics among new cars sold in the EU jumped from 11% in 2020 to 18% in 2021.
By shifting more car journeys to buses and trains, and encouraging walking, emissions from transport could fall even faster.
AGRICULTURE: Cleaning up farms
The EU has made little progress in cleaning up its farms, which are responsible for about 10% of its greenhouse gas emissions. These come in lots of shapes and from different sources — methane from cow burps, nitrous oxide from fertilizer, and both from manure.
Two-thirds of the EU’s agriculture emissions come from animals. The EU plans to bring in sustainable feed additives, which can cut methane from cows, and reduce the amount of soy grown on deforested land to feed livestock. It says the shift cannot happen without a change in people’s diets.
👉 Original article on DW
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