This morning the European Parliament adopted the trilogue agreement reached with its co-legislator last December, concerning the European climate law (ECL) amendment introducing a binding intermediate climate target for 2040 of a 90% reduction in net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to 1990 levels. 413 MEPs voted in favour of the text, 226 against, and 12 abstained. A majority of members rejected an amendment tabled by the Patriots for Europe proposing the rejection of the proposal as a whole. This vote concludes the Parliament’s first reading.
This agreement maintains the -90% GHG emissions target by 2040, as proposed by the European Commission. This new target implies an extremely ambitious decarbonisation trajectory for the European economy, when the current EU approach to the green transition is already challenged by global competitors like China and the United States. In this context, Farm Europe considers that beyond the target, a new pathway should be defined at the European Union level in order to progress on the climate ambitions while creating a true opportunity for the economy, including for farmers. Therefore, we welcome the new wording inserted in the provisional deal inciting the European Commission to “ensure and support a fair and just, pragmatic, cost-effective and socially balanced transition for all [..] paying particular attention to impacts on […] farmers”.
In order to put this statement into motion, the European Commission should unlock the potential contribution of the agricultural sector’s own decarbonisation and that of other industries, such as energy, chemicals, plastics and biomaterials. To achieve this, the European agricultural sector’s capacity to capture carbon and supply circular biogenic carbon to other sectors must be scaled up and this carbon value chain fully acknowledged. To this end, the EU must ensure the creation of a stable and solid market for agricultural carbon removals and emission reductions, so as to provide real incentives to farmers. An effective solution in this sense would be to allow economic actors covered by the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) to meet part of their obligations through EU carbon farming credits. The fact that the agreement includes a possibility for domestic permanent carbon removals to be used to compensate for hard-to-abate emissions in the ETS seems to be a step in the right direction, but further measures need to be taken to cover emission reductions in the farming sector as well.
Furthermore, Farm Europe expresses deep concern regarding the agreement’s provision establishing that, starting from 2036, up to 5% (two additional percentage points compared to the original proposal) of the emissions reductions counting towards the -90% target for 2040 can come from international carbon credits (Member States will also be allowed to apply to outsource a further five percentage points). Although the European Parliament obtained the inclusion of conditions to ensure that these credits will be linked to emission reductions in third countries that are permanent, would not have happened otherwise, and do not result in double counting (by both the EU and the third country), this principle paves the way for unreliable certificates and risks of large-scale fraud. This is particularly worrisome at a time when the Commission is already struggling to control fraud within global green value chains like imported Annex IX biofuels. Such certificates would be impossible to adequately verify, thus undermining their credibility. Moreover, since their value would not reflect the true costs of decarbonisation efforts put in place within the European Union, this risks discouraging investments for domestic actions.
O artigo foi publicado originalmente em Farm Europe.
