EU all but guaranteed to miss global deadline for climate targets

BRUSSELS — The European Union is set to miss a global deadline for new climate targets … while preparing to lecture the world about the importance of those goals. 
By Feb. 10, governments are meant to send fresh plans for how they plan to tackle climate change to the United Nations. These documents, the backbone of the Paris Agreement, will set out each country’s efforts to cut planet-warming emissions by 2035. 
The EU, which files a collective target for its 27 member countries, has said that pushing for ambitious 2035 plans is one of its top priorities for the global climate summit that kicked off in Azerbaijan on Monday. And with Donald Trump set to return to the White House, many are looking to the EU to expand its leadership role. 
But as European diplomats, ministers and leaders arrive in Baku, the bloc is setting itself up to file its own plan late — perhaps even very late, given the growing reluctance among some EU countries to commit to more ambitious climate targets. 
“It’s basically impossible” to meet the February deadline, said a senior Polish government official. Warsaw will lead discussions on the new plan in January when it takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, which guides negotiations among EU capitals.
“I would be happily surprised if we can meet that timeframe,” Danish Climate Minister Lars Aagaard told POLITICO last month. Denmark will assume the Council presidency next July, meaning Aagaard is expected to co-lead the EU delegation at the landmark COP30 summit in Brazil, where the 2035 climate targets will be the central issue. 
One reason for the hold-up is the EU’s institutional setup. Legislation usually takes a year or longer to pass, and the bloc is in the middle of a months-long transition phase following this summer’s election — with the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm that proposes legislation, effectively paralyzed until December. 
But the institutional complexity also serves as a convenient fig leaf for the EU’s growing disunity on climate issues. 
Some countries feel that the bloc is doing enough and it’s time for other countries to step up, as the EU now accounts for only 6 percent of global emissions. (The bloc is responsible for 12 percent of carbon dioxide released since the pre-industrial era.) 
“We don’t give ourselves enough credit,” said the Polish official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “We are leading by example, and it’s an excellent example.” 
“The EU has already done a lot for climate,” a senior climate negotiator from another EU country said. “My government even thinks Europe is doing too much.” 
It doesn’t help that while the Paris Agreement requires countries to file plans — known in U.N. jargon as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) — every five years, the EU only sets itself targets for each decade. 
The bloc currently plans to reduce net emissions by 55 percent by 2030 on a path to zero in 2050. Earlier this year, the Commission also suggested a 90 percent target for 2040. The idea is that the EU will draw a line between its 2030 and 2040 targets to get its 2035 goal. 
For the 2040 target to become law, the Commission must present a formal proposal, which then goes to both the European Parliament and governments represented in the Council for months of negotiations. The proposal is expected in the first quarter of 2025; the 2030 target, the foundation of the EU’s current NDC, took a year to agree. 
In theory, nothing is stopping the bloc’s leaders from preempting that whole process with a political declaration backing a certain target. In 2020, the EU submitted its long-term strategy under the Paris Agreement — an overarching vision guiding the NDCs — after government leaders and the European Parliament issued formal calls for the bloc to reach climate neutrality in 2050. 
But global warming is now taking a backseat to economic woes and the war in Ukraine. Governments seem not to be in a hurry to start a discussion on new climate targets. While a handful of EU countries, Denmark among them, have endorsed a 90 percent target for 2040, others, including Poland, aren’t yet ready to do so.
A discussion over whether to even mention the Commission’s 90 percent recommendation in the EU’s COP29 negotiating mandate pushed ministerial discussions late into the night in October, with the figure ultimately scrapped from the document. 
The Polish official suggested that a 2040 target wasn’t necessary to agree on a 2035 plan. “We could just draw a straight line from our 2030 target to the 2050 target.” 
But that would lead to a less ambitious 2035 figure than if the target is derived from a 90 percent reduction goal in 2040 — roughly 66 percent versus 72 percent, by POLITICO’s back-of-the-envelope calculation. Predictably, more climate-forward EU countries don’t like that approach.
Some worry that Poland — the bloc’s foremost climate laggard — wants to delay the 2040 discussion as long as possible. The country holds presidential elections in May. 
If the 2040 proposal is left for the Danish Council presidency to deal with, the EU may not be able to present its new climate plan before COP30 starts in November 2025, Aagaard warned. “Looking at the time frame, we take over only in July, so there is a very short window to when we need to conclude and send our [plan] to COP,” he said. 
NDCs sound like a technical detail, but they form the foundation of the Paris Agreement. Current plans have the world on track for up to 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming, far above the accord’s goal of limiting the increase in temperatures to below 2C and ideally 1.5C. 
The upcoming plans will likely determine whether the world will blow past the Paris targets. U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell earlier this year described them as perhaps “the most important documents to be produced … so far this century.” Stiell urged G20 economies — responsible for 77 percent of emissions — to take on a leadership role in this process. 
Some G20 countries have signaled they may unveil their targets at COP29. The United Arab Emirates, the host of last year’s COP28 summit, presented its plan last week; Brazil unveiled a 2035 target of between 59 percent and 67 percent this weekend. 
Given the schedule of EU environment ministers’ meetings, the bloc is now likely to file its NDC in the summer — or, if Poland can’t wrap up the discussions among countries, in October, said Linda Kalcher, director at Brussels-based think tank Strategic Perspectives. 
“It would look odd for the European leadership if a range of G20 countries are ready and the Europeans are only ready in June at best, or October,” she said. 
Stiell also called on countries to ensure that this round of climate plans breaks the targets down by sector and greenhouse gas — setting sub-goals for methane emissions, for example. 
The EU is highly unlikely to do that, as it would require passing detailed legislation. But even in the longer term, the Commission does not have a plan to present a specific methane target, according to a leaked briefing paper from its climate department. 
The Commission did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with POLITICO and other media outlets on Friday, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said that the bloc’s NDC would “more or less timely.” 
“Given that we have just had European elections, we have a new Commission and then there’s a bit of work to be done, we will not have concluded this, I think, in the next couple of months, but we will try to make as much speed as possible,” he said. “I am confident we will have a more or less timely delivery.”
Hoekstra did not elaborate on what the EU’s next NDC will contain, pointing to the bloc’s past achievements — the 2030 target, the 2050 target and last year’s unexpectedly steep drop in emissions — as signs that the plan will be ambitious. 
Kalcher warned that other countries might use any EU delays as an excuse for being late with their plans. 
“I would just sincerely hope that they tone down their whole international leadership narrative slightly if they miss the deadline in February,” she said. “And they are setting themselves up to miss it.”