If the United Kingdom wants to reach net-zero emissions, at the government has indicated, it will need negative carbon technologies, the advisory Committee on Climate Change said in a report Thursday. “Even with full deployment of known low-carbon measures some UK emissions will remain, especially from aviation, agriculture and parts of industry. Greenhouse gas removal options (e.g. afforestation, carbon-storing materials, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and direct air capture and storage) will be required alongside widespread decarbonisation in order to reach net zero emissions,” the report says.
The report, which examines the U.K.’s role in reaching the international goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change as an independent party, as opposed to a European Union member state, notes that currently there is no scenario using current technology that shows how the U.K. can reach net zero emissions.
To address this inadequacy, the CCC suggested the government develop a strategy that: supports research, development, and demonstration of carbon removal technologies; supports the deployment of such technologies “by removing barriers and providing incentives for options that are technically more mature;” and integrates the technologies into the nation’s policy and accounting frameworks.
The U.K. has pledged to join the Paris Agreement by the end of the year, but it will have to develop its own nationally determined contribution for combatting climate change. The nation had been lumped into the NDC of the European Union, but as the U.K. voted in June to leave the EU, it must establish its own targets. Fortunately, the U.K. already has emission reduction targets in place. “The vote to leave the EU does not change the UK’s legal commitments to reduce its emissions by 57% by 2030 and at least 80% by 2050 (relative to 1990) under the Climate Change Act,” a CCC release explains.
The CCC said that while the targets in the Climate Change Act are not stringent enough to help put the world on a path the limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, as is called for in the Paris Agreement, the nation should stick with its plan. The Climate Change Act targets “are already stretching and relatively ambitious compared to pledges from other countries,” the report says.
