19 out of 34 countries surveyed failed to fully meet their 2020 climate pledges set 15 years ago, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
The study compared the actual net carbon emissions of more than 30 nations to their 2009 climate pledges set during the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
The paper, led by researchers at UCL and Tsinghua University, is the first comprehensive attempt to gauge how well countries met their Nationally Determined Contribution reduction pledges from COP15.
The research, ‘Revisiting Copenhagen climate mitigation targets,’ was detailed in a paper in Nature Climate Change.
Some countries used carbon leakage to reach climate pledges
Of the 34 nations analysed in the study, 15 successfully met their climate pledges, while 12 failed outright.
The remaining seven countries fell into a category the study authors termed the ‘halfway group’.
These are nations that reduced carbon emissions within their own borders but did so in part by using trade to shift emissions they would have made to other countries.
Known as ‘carbon leakage’ or ‘carbon transfer’, this outsourcing of carbon emissions is a growing concern amongst environmental policymakers as countries seek to meet newer climate pledges.
To track this carbon leakage, the researchers used a ‘consumption-based’ emissions tracking method, which provides a more comprehensive scheme to calculate a country’s carbon emissions.
It not only accounts for the emissions originating from economic activities within the nation’s territorial borders but also the carbon footprint of imported goods manufactured abroad.
Professor Jing Meng, from the UCL Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction and lead author of the study, explained: “Consumption-based analysis enables us to completely track carbon emissions, even when they’re offshored.
“Our concern is that the countries that struggled to reach their commitment from 2009 will likely encounter even more substantial difficulties reducing emissions even further.”
Disparities between countries’ emissions goals
These climate pledges were set in 2009 at the COP15 international climate summit in Copenhagen.
There, despite being unable to reach a comprehensive global agreement, individual countries around the world established their own individual emissions reduction targets.
This meant that established goals varied widely, from Croatia’s modest but successful pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 5% to Switzerland’s relatively ambitious but unsuccessful effort to reduce its carbon emissions by 20-30% by 2020, relative to 1990 levels.
The research also highlights the disparities between the countries’ different starting points.
Though four eastern European nations – Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Romania – were successfully able to achieve their climate pledges, the researchers point out that this was largely because much of the region’s industry involved many outdated and highly inefficient technologies left over from the early 1990s that they’ve more recently transitioned away from using.
Greater challenges are ahead for countries that haven’t reduced their emissions
In addition, the researchers caution that the countries that struggled the most to meet their COP15 goals are likely to encounter even bigger challenges in the future as they face even greater demand for energy as their economies further expand and develop.
The main ways that countries were able to meet their climate pledges were by increasing the amount of clean energy they produced, especially transitioning away from coal power, and making more efficient use of the energy produced.
Countries unable to meet their targets were largely unable to do so because increased consumption associated with rising GDP per capita and population growth outpaced their efforts to increase efficiency, even though many of the countries were able to increase their efficiency somewhat.
Senior author Professor Dabo Guan said: “Reducing emissions is critical to combat the ongoing climate crisis.
“To do this, it’s imperative we have an accurate and reliable account of emissions, and this research shows some of the challenges countries face in reducing emissions while maintaining their economic growth.”
Guan concluded: “Developed countries have a dual role – rapidly reducing their own emissions and providing financial aid and capacity building to developing countries, which most of them deliver insufficiently.”
