To facilitate a transatlantic exchange of views, Carbon Market Watch brought together experts from the USA, the UK, Germany and the EU to track progress towards implementing separate climate targets and carbon removals policies.
Carbon Market Watch recently organised a webinar aimed at delving deeper into how key trailblazing countries, states and regions on both sides of the Atlantic are planning to rely on carbon dioxide removals (CDR) to achieve their climate ambitions and whether they aim to deploy it in addition to or as a replacement for emissions reductions.
CMW has long called for governments to adopt separate targets for gross emissions reductions, biogenic sequestration by natural sinks, and permanent carbon removals. In one of our most supported initiatives, we and 121 other stakeholders urged EU policymakers to put in place these three separate targets in the upcoming proposal for a 2040 climate goal.
The case for separate targets
The webinar opened with introductory remarks by Duncan McLaren, a research fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. McLaren, who is among the first researchers to raise the issue of separating targets, set the stage for the discussion. He reminded participants about the climate role of carbon removals, and made the case for separating targets.
“As prospects for halting climate change within plus 1.5°C recede, it is more important than ever that the world’s limited capacities for carbon removal are mobilised to deal with excess carbon in the atmosphere, and not as a substitute for cutting emissions and phasing out fossil fuels;” said McLaren. “Separate targets for emissions cuts and carbon removal are a critical tool for ensuring responsible climate policy in the coming years.”
USA: Murky outlook
The introduction was followed by a panel discussion featuring five distinguished experts who provided insights on CDR-related policies and legislation in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Germany. All of them agreed that setting separate climate targets is very important.
Katie Lebling, senior associate at the World Resources Institute’s US climate programme, gave an overview of the ongoing policy and action being undertaken by the US federal government. She highlighted that while several measures are in place to scale up carbon removals and going in the direction of setting separate targets, more has to be done, for example, to model estimates of how much CDR will be needed to achieve the US net-zero target. She concluded that it was unlikely that the new Trump administration would put forward a proposal for separate targets.
Complementing Lebling’s overview, Danny Cullenward, senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and American University, shed some light on the situation in California. He painted a stark picture of how the Golden State is dealing with carbon removals, flagging that while California’s climate law prioritises emission reductions, its strategy for implementing carbon removal remains vague, lacks any funding mechanism for removals, and could end up conflating carbon removals and emission reductions.
Europe: Mixed outlook
On this side of the Atlantic, Josh Burke, policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment of the London School of Economics, reported that the principle of separating targets is getting less traction in the UK compared to the EU. While it seems from the UK’s climate documents that targets should remain separate for emissions and CDR, current proposals, such as the potential introduction of both permanent and non-permanent removals into the UK’s Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS), suggest it will be challenging to respect this principle in the country.
Lastly, Julia Teppe, policy advisor on Climate and Energy at WWF Germany and Fabien Ramos, policy officer at the European Commission, updated the audience on the progress in Germany and in the EU, respectively. Germany is among the few countries to have separate targets for gross emissions reductions and land-based removals, and has expressed the intention to set a legal target for technical removals. For its part, the EU is still falling short of this approach. Ramos said, however, that there is an understanding that permanent and temporary removals have to be better separated.
The time is ripe
The panel was followed by a Q&A session that touched upon, among other things, the importance of adopting comprehensive accounting frameworks, both at the global and country levels, and how to avoid carbon removals deterring other forms of climate action. The discussion made it clear that if challenges to the implementation of separate climate targets currently remain, there are opportunities for collaboration on the topic.
The webinar was well attended, with more than 100 participants joining the discussion online. Governments should recognise the widespread support for transparency in how climate plans are formulated and undertake concrete action in this direction.
The EU has the opportunity to lead the way by adopting three separate climate targets in its upcoming proposal and Nationally Determined Contribution. Other countries could follow suit to help make the three-target approach an established global practice.
