"Unpacking leadership-driven global scenarios towards the Paris Agreement"

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) was set up as part of the Climate Change Act. The CCC is an independent body tasked with providing advice to Government on climate change issues, and particularly the setting of carbon budgets, and the monitoring of progress towards meeting those budgets.

The Committee provided advice on the fifth carbon budget (setting a limit on UK emissions in the period 2028-2032) in November 2015 and will be providing advice on the sixth carbon budget (2033-2037) in September 2020. This will be the first budget set since the Government legislated to change the greenhouse gas emissions target set out in the Climate Change Act from an 80% reduction relative to 1990 levels by 2050, to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The CCC's past reports are available here: http://www.theccc.org.uk/reports/.

The international context to the Committee's net-zero advice

In May 2019 the Committee published 'Net Zero: The UK's contribution to stopping global warming'. The report set out the Committee's advice that the UK should commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Government and Devolved Administrations subsequently legislated for net zero greenhouse gas targets.

A key part of this advice focused on the role a net-zero target in the UK could play in helping the global effort to meet the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement to keep warming 'well-below 2°C' and 'pursuing efforts' to keep it below 1.5°C. We developed a 'leadership-driven' scenario of the global effort in which developed countries with high capability to reduce emissions and significant historical responsibility for climate change reached net-zero CO2 emissions by or before 2050, large developing economies rapidly peak emissions and reduce them to net-zero before the end of the century, and developing countries 'leap-frog' to low-carbon development paths keeping emissions low on a per person basis across the century. The focus of this scenario was to set-up a plausible global pathway to achieving the Paris Agreement, consistent with the political realities of international climate policy, and moving beyond a purely 'cost-optimal' sharing of effort between different regions of the world.

The narrative underlying this scenario was summarised in Chapter 3 of the Committee's Net Zero report, alongside other evidence which we concluded together supported the UK setting a more ambitious net-zero target than required for the world as a whole.

CCC's sixth carbon budget advice

Under the Climate Change Act (2008) the CCC is required to consider 'circumstances at European and international level' when recommending the level of UK carbon budgets to Government. The sixth carbon budget will set the pathway for the UK from now to Net Zero.

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