The goal of the Paris Agreement translates into “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
The European Commission was asked by the European Council, in March 2018, to present by the first quarter of 2019 a proposal for a strategy for long-term EU GHG emissions reductions that are in accordance with the Paris Agreement.
The European Commission presented in 2018 its Clean Planet for All vision, providing decarbonisation scenarios for 2050, including the scenario of a net-zero emissions EU economy. The goal of net-zero emissions still needs to be endorsed by the EU member states. Such a goal will be a key driver for robust decarbonisation policies in all sectors of the economy, and transport can play a major role given that it is the EU’s biggest climate problem.
What happens next?
In T&E we are working on this process with two main goals:
- To ensure that the overall 2050 climate target is truly compliant with the Paris Agreement and put the EU in a trajectory to decarbonise before the middle of the century;
- To guarantee that transport is properly reflected throughout the process as the sector with the largest emissions while showing all existing and potential decarbonisation options in the sector. T&E has produced a vision for a full transport decarbonisation for 2050 to feed into this process.