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The United Kingdom plans to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions by at least 81 per cent by 2035 from 1990 levels, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Baku.
This goal is part of the country’s new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the Paris Agreement for 2035 due to be submitted in 2025. NDCs are national climate action plans updated every five years by countries to align with the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C, ideally to 1.5°C.
“We took the opportunity at this COP to again urge all Parties to come forward with ambitious targets of their own. As we all agreed at the last COP,” Starmer said.
This announcement comes after the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) provided its recommendation of the UK’s NDC. CCC is a non-departmental public body that advises the government on emissions targets and reports to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“The new UK NDC aligns with a cost-effective pathway to 1.5ºC: represents real ambition for 2035. Now it’s time to translate this into action. The UK must turbocharge policy development for this new target to be credible See our recent update on UK policies,” Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis that measures government climate action, wrote on X.
Grantham institute lauded the government’s target but noted that it now needs to set out clear steps to rapidly move away from production and consumption of all fossil fuels and support a just transition for workers and communities.
UK’s current NDC until 2030 was rated as “Insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker. “The “Insufficient” rating indicates that the UK’s climate policies and action in 2030 need substantial improvements to be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C,” it wrote on its website.
The new goals come even as the UK looks at the oil and gas industry as an important partner to reach net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.
Earlier this year, in May 2024, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) — an executive non-departmental public body — offered 31 licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. In January, companies like Shell, Equinor, BP, Total and NEO and 12 other companies were offered 24 licences.
Further, the country also plans to invest almost £22 billion in carbon capture and storage (CCS), technologies that capture carbon dioxide from a polluting source and storing it underground. Mark Maslin, Professor of Natural Sciences, UCL, wrote in The Conversation that this will lock the UK into fossil fuel dependence past 2050 — the year it plans to reach net-zero. Natural gas comes with upstream emissions from methane leaks, transport and processing, he added. Methane is a greenhouse gas, which is over 80 times more powerful than CO2 on a 20-year basis.
“The 2025 submission should integrate the following elements in the NDC: sectoral targets aligned with science, Global Stocktake outcomes and other international commitments, food systems transformation and nature conservation,” the World Wildlife Fund for Nature said in a statement.
The 2024 UN Emissions Gap report warned that if the current NDCs are implemented without more ambitious pledges — due by February 2025 — the world could warm by up to 2.6°C by the end of the century.