UK commits to 80% emissions cuts by 2050
17 October 2008
The UK government announced yesterday that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050.
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband: 'Emissions are growing faster than expected.'
The decision - based on the latest scientific evidence - is significantly more challenging than the previous commitment of 60 per cent below 1990 levels.
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband, stated last night that the assessment was based on an independent scientific report from Lord Turner's committee on climate change.
Miliband said, 'Arctic sea ice is melting faster than expected. Emissions are growing across the world faster than expected. And the damage of climate change is greater than expected.
'For all those reasons they have recommended that we move from a 60 per cent target in 2060 to an 80 per cent target by 2050, and I've accepted their advice.'
'The damage of climate change is greater than expected.'
Ed Miliband, Minister for Climate Change and Energy
The decision comes just nine days after Lord Turner's committee, which includes Professor Jim Skea, research director at the UK Energy Research Centre and Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, published its interim advice to government recommending more stringent cuts.
This is not business as usual
The speed of the decision is not a surprise to Turner's panel. Skea says, 'The Prime Minister indicated at the Labour Party Conference that he was willing to respond quickly once we made a recommendation.'
But the scale of the changes will be challenging. 'We have said in our letter to the government that this is not business as usual. The very obvious priority is decarbonising the electricity industry. Buildings and transport are also up there as priorities.'
Skea explains that the panel thought about two things: what is scientifically necessary and what is feasible.
The Sleipner oil field. One of the world's first large-scale demonstrations of pumping carbon dioxide back into oil fields.
'We would not have made the recommendations if we thought the target was unfeasible.'
Skea comments that the committee based its findings on the policy-relevant research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the large UK contribution to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produced its fourth assessment report in 2007.
'This research has been extremely significant,' says Skea.
The committee's advice stated that 'the 80 per cent target should apply on average across all sectors of the UK economy and is achievable'. It estimates the cost to be 1-2 per cent of GDP in 2050.
The sheer scale of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions will take some time to sink in. The research community is already working with industry and governments to make the transition.
Making headway
The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has set up a way for governments and local authorities to assess their region's emissions and create tailor-made scenarios for reducing emissions.
Demand for the new service, called GRIP, or Greenhouse Gas Inventory Protocol, has been so great it has turned into a limited company - Carbon Captured Ltd.
'So far, we've developed the GRIP emissions baseline for all the English regions and devolved administrations,' says the company's director Sebastian Carney.
'Four regions have already used the system: Stockholm county, Veneto, Bologna Province and Glasgow and the Clyde Valley.
'A further 21 regions are lining up, including ten capital cities: London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki, Brussels, Athens, Oslo, Moscow and Ljubljana in Slovenia,' he adds.
Carbon Captured Ltd is also in talks with the Californian government.
The original 60 per cent target for emissions cuts was based on a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report published in 2000.
New evidence
Since that report, the committee say new information has become available, including information on arctic sea ice, a better understanding of global carbon sinks, and climate models that include the warming effects of other gases as well as carbon dioxide.
Sea ice reached record lows in summer 2007. This year saw similar falls and it now looks like ice is not only reducing in area but also thinning. Some scientists predict the whole region will be ice free in summer as early as 2030.
The summer of 2007 saw record sea ice lows in the Arctic.
Researchers from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling are currently in the Arctic onboard the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn. This is the second year they have braved freezing conditions to measure changes in freshwater content of the ocean in some of its remotest outposts. The work is part of an International Polar Year project to do a comprehensive survey of Arctic oceanography.
Other scientists from the Scottish Association for Marine Science have been dropping weather instruments on ice floes to assess the state of the Arctic in the face of environmental change.
The committee also state that latest research suggests rising temperatures will reduce the effectiveness of carbon sinks - the oceans and forests that together absorb half the annual human emissions.
Saturation point?
In the UK, Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Professor Andrew Watson and colleagues at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey are providing valuable information on changes to ocean sinks in the Southern and Atlantic oceans.
In 2007, Le Quéré and colleagues' paper in the American journal Science, entitled 'Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink due to recent climate change', reported that as human CO2 emissions increased, the researchers had expected the Southern Ocean CO2 sink would increase too. But they were surprised to discover that this assumption was incorrect. In the past 25 years, CO2 emissions increased by 40 per cent, but the Southern Ocean CO2 sink stayed the same. Its ability to absorb CO2 is not keeping up with growing emissions.
On land, international projects led by researchers funded by NERC at the universities of Leeds and Oxford are changing views on how the rainforests store and release carbon - and how this will change in the future.
A key finding is the discovery that mature rainforests are not carbon-neutral and that Amazonia's biomass, at least for now, is absorbing 15 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities. This conclusion suggests sustaining mature forests will play a key role in controlling atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Low-level ozone stops plants absorbing carbon dioxide
Other factors the committee considered were new climate models that include the warming effects of gases other than carbon dioxide.
The Met Office, Professor Peter Cox, director of the Climate and Land-Surface Systems Interaction Centre and colleagues from and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology have shown recently that rising levels of low-level ozone - caused by industrial emissions - will significantly hamper plants' ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
In 2007, the team reported in the journal Nature that this could cause more of the greenhouse gas to accumulate in the atmosphere than previously estimated.
The research shows that this indirect effect of low-level ozone on climate could be at least as great as ozone's direct effect as a greenhouse gas.
Their global model projects that between the years 1901 and 2100, gross primary productivity on land may decrease 14-23 per cent owing to plant ozone damage.
The Climate Change Committee's findings support the Stern Review on the economics of climate change, published in 2006, which relied on evidence provided by the UK's leading climate experts, many of them funded or employed by NERC.
The committee is due to publish a full analysis on 1 December.
Interesting? Spread the word using the 'tools' menu on the right.
