The EU's Climate Challenges and Climate Politics

How will the EU tackle the climate and biodiversity crises in the coming crucial years? Europe is the  fastest-warming continent, globally, and its nature and biodiversity is in a state of serious decline. Yet, leading climate experts are warning the EU is likely to miss its own 55% target for emissions reductions by 2030 unless it rapidly steps up – possibly not even hitting 50% (a target Scotland has already achieved).

In February, the European Commission proposed a 90% emissions reduction target for 2040. But the big question is whether the EU will manage to make this target a reality over the next decade and a half, not least if it can’t meet its 2030 target first.

Political Priorities and Political Dynamics

Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, put the European Green Deal at the heart of her first five year term that started back in 2019. But it’s not getting the same headline priority as she sets out her plans for her second term from now to 2029. The renewed European Parliament, after its elections in June, may still have a majority of centrist parties but the largest party is the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) which has been notably sceptical on several climate policies in the recent past. And the Parliament now has more far-right members too and fewer Green MEPs, though the centre-left Socialists & Democrats are the second largest grouping in the Parliament.

It’s notable, too, that the EU’s leaders agreed the European Council’s new five year strategy this summer with three top priorities: a free and democratic Europe; a strong and secure Europe, and a prosperous and competitive Europe. Green priorities come in under the competitiveness heading. But they’re not exactly headlined.

For the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen has insisted that the European Green Deal is still there and being implemented but her proposed overarching goals are very similar (unsurprisingly) to those of the EU’s leaders with competitiveness and security now coming to the fore as top priorities. A week ago she told journalists that climate change is the ‘major backdrop’ for EU policies. But that doesn’t sound as core a priority as in the last five years.

In putting together her group of 26 Commissioners designate (ahead of European Parliament hearings this autumn), von der Leyen has given half the portfolios to EPP colleagues. She has also effectively split climate and biodiversity across several portfolios (and, too, for other policy areas) resulting in ultimate power being even more highly centralised in her hands than in the previous Commission. Still, there is a powerful Vice-President portfolio of a ‘clean, just and competitive transition’ given to Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera. But the wider Commission dynamics are going to be complicated across overlapping portfolios, even before bringing in member state/Council and European Parliament political dynamics.

Overall, on climate measures, there has been substantial progress on the shift to renewable energy across the EU impacting on the nature of both domestic and industrial consumption of energy. But there has been less progress in road transport and buildings. And almost no steps forward in agriculture. And much more is still needed.

According to the Bruegel think tank, the share of renewable energy in final consumption needs to almost double from 22.5% in 2022 to 42.5% in 2030 to meet the EU’s ‘Fit for 55’ 2030 target – a target which green NGOs say anyway should be set at 65% or higher. The European Environment Agency warned at the end of last year that the EU was only on track to reduce emissions by around 48% - which would be a serious failing. Sustained and very large climate-energy investments need to be the order of the day.

Right-wing and Far-right Climate Scepticism

While Von der Leyen drove forward the European Green Deal for most of her first term as Commission president, her green credentials were found wanting earlier this year, as farmers demonstrated across several EU member states. To placate them – and to placate the EPP, her own party grouping (whose support she needed to get a second term as Commission president) – she withdrew planned legislation on reducing pesticide use and removed emission control targets for the agricultural sector from the Commission’s 2040 climate goals paper.

At the same time, the EU’s vital Nature Restoration Law, only just made it through the Council earlier this year, having struggled to get through the European Parliament, in weakened form, after most of the EPP voted against it in 2023. This law, alongside the EU’s biodiversity strategy for 2030, will now form the main basis of the EU’s contribution to the upcoming COP16 UN Biodiversity summit. The EU is still moving forward but climate-sceptic politics is creating a serious drag on progress.

Green policies are, of course, not protected from being highly politically neuralgic – which is why they need strong political leadership and public support. In Germany, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) has turned the transition from gas boilers to heat pumps into a populist cause. And farmers, in the face of multiple pressures, have proved another easy target for those stirring up anti-climate protests in several member states. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, last week, called the EU’s ban on CO2 emitting cars by 2035 “self-destructive”. Some other member states are likely to join her in calling for a delay or change to this target – hopefully unsuccessfully. The real challenge on cars is rather whether the EU can face up to international competition on electric vehicles, notably from China and the US – that should be the focus, not the complaints of climate-sceptic right-wing or far-right EU leaders.

Tackling the climate and biodiversity crises is a fundamental part of ensuring Europe’s security, and too its economic strength. But the downgrading of climate and biodiversity from headline priorities is a cause for concern. Time is short to ramp up efforts, and results, on tackling the climate and biodiversity crises.

Earlier this year, the European Environment Agency produced its first climate risks report, warning of disaster if decisive action is not taken. The EU, it said, is not adequately prepared and action must be intensified and speeded up. But too many of Europe’s politicians are protecting their own voter base and/or being distracted by other crises – of which there are many at European and international level. The political challenge for the EU is clear.

Looking Ahead

More pragmatically, one of the advantages of the EU is that, on the whole, once priorities have been set and laws passed, then the focus moves on to implementation and the next steps of whatever is the current roadmap, though speed and breadth of implementation represents another critical challenge – as we see from the EU being off-track to meet its own 55% target by 2030.

Looking ahead, the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, effectively a carbon border tax, is currently in a trial phase but will become fully operational in 2026. There will be a second phase of the EU’s emissions trading scheme, ETS2, due to start in 2027 applying especially to buildings and transport sectors. And, from this August, the Nature Restoration Law means that restoration measures must be in place for 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030, and for all ecosystems that need restoration by 2050.

The EU’s Deforestation Regulation is also due to come into force this December. It, too, has sparked some controversy as its aim of stopping imports of goods like palm oil or coffee grown on recently clear land has proved difficult in practice and faces pushback from many developing countries. Some member states are now calling for a delay, so this is another one to watch.

Apart from questions of adequacy of the speed and goals of EU actions, and climate sceptic political fightbacks in some areas, one of the biggest gaps in all this is the agricultural sector, responsible for around 12% of EU emissions. The EU’s chief climate scientist warned this week that without measures to target agricultural emissions, the EU cannot meet its 2040 targets. This political debate is not going away and the need for action on agricultural emissions and land use is central. And it will also become entangled in the bargaining and rows over the next three years that will culminate in the EU’s next seven year budget from 2028, including the future support to, and nature of, the EU’s common agricultural policy.

In agriculture, some of the solutions lie with helping smaller farmers rather than big ones, and shifting more to focus on support for sustainable farming and for promoting biodiversity. But emissions costs from agriculture and land use, and land use change, will have to be tackled across the board.

More broadly, across society and the economy, a just transition is vital – for fairness and to manage climate politics. Measures to address the problem when costs of tackling the climate and biodiversity crises fall unfairly on less well-off households or businesses need strengthening and require adept political management. Bruegel, the Brussels think tank, has called for a Green social contract, encompassing the existing Just Transition Fund and the Social Climate Fund (linked to ETS2), and proposes, relatedly, a Rural Green Deal. These sort of holistic and strategic proposals for managing the politics of climate and biodiversity policies are vital.

EU-UK Cooperation?

The EU’s climate and biodiversity policies all sit within the wider international context. And with both COP16 and COP29 this autumn bringing together the next international conferences on biodiversity and climate change, the EU needs to be a leader not a follower, both on the move from fossil fuels and on climate finance for developing and climate vulnerable countries.

The UK’s new government, sitting in a less influential position outside the EU, post-Brexit, has said that it wants to prioritise climate change internationally as well as domestically. There is scope for more and better EU-UK cooperation on climate change, not least on aligning emissions trading schemes to ensure new trade barriers do not arise from climate border taxes. But there are also limits to how much can be done under the existing EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement as a recent study points out. Beyond that, whether EU and UK climate diplomacy can be coordinated, and to what effect, is a rather open question in the face of wider European and global conflicts and geopolitical instability.

In the end, the EU’s climate and biodiversity challenges must be met. What needs to be done, and with great urgency, is clear. The political challenge for the EU’s institutions, its member states and its politicians is to lead not to undermine or prevaricate. And the challenge for European democracy – the wider public, activists, experts, the media, NGOs and more – is to demand sustained, urgent and systemic action, holding politicians across the EU to account on the biggest challenge of our times.