Credit: iStock – Altaf-Shah
Sir Keir Starmer has announced that the UK is planning to accelerate the pace of its emissions reductions over the next decade.
In his keynote address at the COP29 climate change summit in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, the Prime Minister said the government has accepted advice issued last month by the Climate Change Committee that the UK should aim to reduce emissions to 81% of 1990 levels by 2035.
The new target, which is part of the UK’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submission at the summit, increases the pace of the country’s emission reductions.
The UK’s previous target, set out in 2020’s Sixth Carbon Budget, was 78% of 1990 emissions levels.
The new target also exceeds the one in the 2008 Climate Change Act, which was 80% of 1990 emissions by 2050, which was superseded in 2019 by the adoption of the 2050 net zero goal.
Commenting on the latest emissions reduction target, Sam Richards, CEO of pro-growth campaign group Britain Remade, urged the government to ‘urgently’ publish its Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which was promised in the King’s Speech earlier this year.
He said: ‘The only way we are going to meet this new target is by slashing the time it takes to build new sources of clean energy.
‘We already have the technology we need; it is our sclerotic planning system that means it can take more than a decade for an offshore wind farm to be built and connected to the Grid.’
Rachel Solomon Williams, executive director at the Aldersgate Group, said the UK’s ‘ambitious NDC is a welcome display of global leadership from the UK government’ that will ‘significantly strengthen our standing on the world stage at a time when international climate leadership is urgently needed’.
