The UK government said today it will submit a revisited Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris agreement, but will keep its target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 68pc by 2030 from 1990 levels unchanged.
The updated NDC will clarify how its existing emission cuts target aligns with the Paris Agreement 1.5°C temperature goal, UK minister of state for climate Graham Stuart said. It will also explain "more fully" how the country will deliver on its 2030 target. The scope of the NDC has been expanded to include the UK's Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, while including "more detail on levelling up, gender, green skills, public engagement, just transition and how the UK is supporting other countries with delivery of their NDCs".
The UK's NDC requires the fastest rate of reduction in greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2030 of any major economy and is on a trajectory to net zero by 2050," Stuart said.
The UK-led Cop 26 concluding text, the Glasgow Climate Pact, requested parties update their 2030 NDCs ahead of this year's Cop 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. But so far only around 15 countries — mostly developing nations — have submitted their revised 2030 goals.
"The UK has shown leadership by revisiting its own NDC to ensure it remains a fair and ambitious contribution to global action on climate change," Stuart said. But environmental group Greenpeace said that although the UK target was better than many other countries, it is not enough to avoid a climate catastrophe. "As president of Cop 26 in Glasgow, the UK chivvied every country in the world to agree to strengthen their contribution to emissions reductions. But after a summer of heatwaves, droughts and catastrophic floods across the world, the UK's update is little more than an emissions accounting exercise," Greenpeace head of politics Rebecca Newsom said.
This comes after new UK prime minister Liz Truss recently announced a package of measures to tackle higher energy costs partly relying on ramping up fossil fuel output, including a new licensing round in the North Sea and lifting a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. Truss said on 8 September that she was committed to the country's legally binding target to hit net zero by 2050, but also said that there will be a review on how to deliver on that target to ensure that it is delivered in a "pro-business and pro-growth" way.
The UK's revised NDC will be submitted in time for the UN framework convention on climate change's (UNFCCC) synthesis report, which looks at countries' new commitments and whether they are sufficient to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C globally compared with industrial levels.
