The EU 1.5° Lifestyles project was invited to provide an official input and recommendations for the EU climate target for 2040 public consultation.
While the project consortium supports action by the European Commission (EC) to keep global warming as close to 1.5°C warming as possible, as enshrined in the Paris Agreement, we are nevertheless concerned that a number of statements made in the document lacked, contradicted, or omitted key aspects of consensus in the scientific community. You can find our full reply to the public consultation below.
The EU 1.5° Lifestyles consortium statement can be downloaded as a PDF document from the European Commission's website.
EU 1.5° Lifestyles Consortium reply: European Commission’s EU climate target for 2040
The EU 1.5° Lifestyles¹ project consortium (thereafter: consortium) strongly supports action by the European Commission (EC) to keep global warming as close to 1.5°C warming as possible, as enshrined in the Paris Agreement. The consortium lauds the EC’s call in the “2040 Climate Target” document for more transformative action across energy, transport, residential, services and industrial systems, including agriculture, waste, and the land use sector. The consortium strongly agrees with the recognition that transforming societies and economies in line with the 1.5°C limits will require considerations of distributional and equity issues, as well as cross-border, cross-institutional collaboration, and leveraging investments across sectors. Indeed, these aspects lie at the heart of an effective, just and holistic climate policy in the European Union.
The consortium is nevertheless concerned that a number of statements that have been made lack a consensus in the scientific community, while key aspects have been omitted. These statements, therefore, run the risk of (a) being perceived as misleading or inaccurate by a large part of the scientific community and (b) undermining the overall goals and possibilities for action as described in the “2040 Climate Target” document.
In line with the 1.5°C limit, the consortium would like to highlight that:
A. There is overwhelming scientific evidence about the core drivers of climate change – the increasing use of materials and energy in the process of production and economic activity[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
B. There is very high scientific confidence that still rising global temperatures will increasingly trigger irreversible runaway changes in the climate system once the 1.5°C limit is breached, as individual tipping points will create a tipping cascade of non-linear heating dynamics[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
C. There is strong scientific agreement that once these tipping cascades enter into action, self-sustaining environmental dynamics will drive further, “non-linear” runaway heating independent of human activities, likely increasing global heating to 3-4° or even 5-6° by the end of the century[1][2][3][4][5];
D. While human economic and productive activity has been the primary cause of global warming, once tipping cascades enter into action, this causation will be reversed, as self-sustaining environmental dynamics will delimit the economy[1][2][3][4][5][6][7];
E. Keeping global heating as close to 1.5°C warming is, therefore, the only way to ensure long-term stability, including economic stability[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
F. The non-linearity in the climate system and the strong likelihood of increasingly severe cascading warming highlights the key importance of adhering to the Paris Agreement and limiting or slowing down runaway climate warming, since this will be more difficult once different tipping points have been breached[1][2][3][4][5][6][7];
G. Scenarios which include a strong focus on sufficiency - limiting production and overconsumption in line with the 1.5°C limit - are currently the only scenarios able to minimise key risks associated with runaway heating[1][2][3][4][5][6][7];
H. Due to the urgency of emissions reduction, the immaturity of negative emissions technology and need for unprecedented technological change at large scales, rebound effects, and diverse related environmental crises (biodiversity loss) related to production, which further amplify global warming, the goal of economic growth is likely no longer in line with the Paris Agreement and limiting runaway global warming [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].
In the perception of the consortium, the "2040 Climate Target" document does not refer or does not sufficiently refer to some key scientific evidence about tipping points and their effects on economic stability. The consortium would therefore like to draw attention to a number of places in the document where said scientific evidence should be added or highlighted more to be given the visibility and priority it requires:
1. The document states that the EU has “successfully decoupled economic activity from GHG emissions and spurred the development of clean energy”. This statement does not represent the latest state of the art of scientific research and the resulting consensus.
a. the word "successful" makes the sentence misleading, since according to the latest research, the only meaningful definition of “success” in this context is if the EU's emissions are falling in line with a 1.5°C pathway (or a fair share of such a pathway), which is not the case [1][2][3][4][5];
b. the latest research in this field, including a rigorous meta-review of decoupling, has shown that while there is some evidence for relative decoupling of emissions from economic growth in limited circumstances, and limited timeframes, there is little evidence of absolute decoupling, especially in the long term [5][6][7][8][9][10];
“primary energy use can be decoupled from GDP only to the extent to which conversion efficiency from primary energy to useful exergy can be increased"[5];
c. there is furthermore no evidence that even absolute decoupling can be aligned with climate targets due to the level of emissions reductions required[5][6][7][8][9][10];
d. furthermore, while it might potentially be easier to decouple emissions from economic growth, no decoupling of materials throughput from economic growth has so far been observed anywhere[5][6][7][8][9][10];
e. to assess the real environmental impact of production and consumption activities, it is important to focus on absolute resource consumption, or in this case net carbon emissions - while there is evidence that the EU has reduced these emissions, studies on the impact of international trade show that the EU is a net importer of emissions, environmental impacts and puts pressure on developing economies [11].
2. The document explains that “the overall impact on GDP [of keeping to the Paris Agreement] is likely to be limited”. The consortium is concerned that this statement could lead to a problematic interpretation in the scientific community and wider public if it is not adequately qualified, as:
a. cascading tipping points and runaway climate change, once the 1.5°C limit is breached, are likely to have severe effects on the economy, economic production, as well as societal welfare, unless emissions are radically reduced in this decade [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
b. adhering to the Paris Agreement and limiting or slowing down runaway global heating requires limiting emissions globally, with fundamental changes to production and economic systems in the very short term, including ceasing production in certain sectors [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
c. it is possible that this can have strong negative impacts on GDP in the short term, especially in Member States highly reliant on carbon-intensive production [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
d. this highlights the importance of facing distributional and equity considerations in climate policy, and ensuring a strong social safety net for communities most affected by the green transition [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12];
e. this statement, furthermore, can be considered value-laden, as it suggests that short-term economic growth takes primacy over long-term environmental, social, and economic stability. Keeping warming as close as possible to the Paris Agreement’s target, while ensuring social stability, must take precedence over economic goals, since a continued focus on GDP growth is likely to undermine future chances for environmental, social and economic stability [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].
3. The consortium strongly recommends that a reference to the latest scientific research on tipping points be included in the document. As the IPCC report points out, these tipping points will result in exceeding the 1.5°C limit, which will likely have a key economic impact due to cascading warming and increasing weather effects[1].
4. The consortium also recommends that the document include a reference to the biodiversity crisis, as this crisis is closely coupled to and exacerbating global warming. The biodiversity crisis highlights the difficulties of simply "greening" current production and consumption, without absolute reductions in production, demand, and a focus on sufficiency policies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].
5. The consortium sees room for improvement in the EU's energy transition policies and action plans, which are highlighted in the document, as many EU countries have reactivated coal-fired power plants and invested in LNG from Israel, Qatar and Azerbaijan to meet growing energy demand. The RePowerEU policy action plan also identifies a number of challenges for the EU to overcome. Current energy policy options are limited to market-based instruments, such as emissions trading and market liberalisation, and the EU is heavily dependent on alliances with China for the extraction and processing of raw materials for renewable energy, which cannot be ended in the short term. Reducing the infrastructural path dependency on carbon-intensive resources thus remains a key issue for limiting warming to the Paris Agreement levels[12].
6. The consortium strongly believes that rigorous, internationally peer-reviewed, scientific research should form the basis of European and national policy-making, especially in high-stakes areas such as climate policy. We thus respectfully urge the European Commission to consider scientific evidence and the latest research, including the authoritative findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, with due seriousness and importance in their decision-making processes, communication, and goal-setting for the next decades[1].
The EU 1.5° Lifestyles¹ Project Consortium,
- University of Münster, Germany
- Lund University, Sweden
- University of A Coruña, Spain
- Leiden University, Netherlands
- D-Mat, Finland
- GreenDependent Institute, Hungary
- Hot Or Cool Institute, Germany
- Adelphi Research, Germany
- Green Liberty/Zala Briviba Biedriba, Latvia
¹The four-year EU 1.5° Lifestyles project (2021-2025) is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 101003880). It involves researchers, practitioners as well as advisory board members from Finland, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Germany. The project’s main aim is to foster the mainstreaming of lifestyles in accordance with the 1.5°C limit and to facilitate transformations sought by the Paris Agreement and the EU Green Deal. For this purpose, the project develops guidance for policy makers, intermediary actors and individuals based on scientific evidence on how lifestyle choices affect individual carbon footprints, and how political, economic, and social contexts enable or constrain shifts to sustainable lifestyles options.
[1] IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 3056 pp., doi:10.1017/9781009325844.
[2] Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Early Warning of Climate Tipping Points’, Nature Climate Change 1, no. 4 (July 2011): 201–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1143.
[3] Timothy M. Lenton et al., ‘Climate Tipping Points — Too Risky to Bet Against’, Nature 575, no. 7784 (28 November 2019): 592–95, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03595-0.
[4] David I. Armstrong McKay et al., ‘Exceeding 1.5°C Global Warming Could Trigger Multiple Climate Tipping Points’, Science 377, no. 6611 (9 September 2022): eabn7950, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950.
[5] Helmut Haberl et al., ‘A Systematic Review of the Evidence on Decoupling of GDP, Resource Use and GHG Emissions, Part II: Synthesising the Insights’, Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 6 (2020): 065003.
[6] Lorenz T. Keyßer and Manfred Lenzen, ‘1.5 °C Degrowth Scenarios Suggest the Need for New Mitigation Pathways’, Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (December 2021): 2676, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22884-9.
[7] Jason Hickel et al., ‘Urgent Need for Post-Growth Climate Mitigation Scenarios’, Nature Energy 6, no. 8 (4 August 2021): 766–68, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00884-9.
[8] Andrew L. Fanning et al., ‘The Social Shortfall and Ecological Overshoot of Nations’, Nature Sustainability 5, no. 1 (18 November 2021): 26–36, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00799-z.
[9] Manfred Lenzen, Lorenz Keyβer, and Jason Hickel, ‘Degrowth Scenarios for Emissions Neutrality’, Nature Food 3, no. 5 (16 May 2022): 308–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00516-9.
[10] Jason Hickel et al., ‘Degrowth Can Work — Here’s How Science Can Help’, Nature 612, no. 7940 (15 December 2022): 400–403, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04412-x.
[11] Richard Wood et al., ‘Growth in Environmental Footprints and Environmental Impacts Embodied in Trade: Resource Efficiency Indicators from EXIOBASE3: Growth in Environmental Impacts Embodied in Trade’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 22, no. 3 (June 2018): 553–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12735.
[12] Rubén Vezzoni, ‘Green Growth for Whom, How and Why? The REPowerEU Plan and the Inconsistencies of European Union Energy Policy’, Energy Research & Social Science 101 (July 2023): 103134, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103134.