Today the world marks Earth Day, an annual event that raises awareness about the need to protect the planet from climate change through environmental action. From being the first major economy to enshrine the 2050 net-zero target into law to hosting COP26, the UK has shown clear leadership on this issue in recent years. But has it continued making enough progress to meet its commitments?
Emissions are going down – but progress will stall without further measures
Let’s start by looking at the progress made so far in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, those responsible for climate change and rising temperatures. Territorial emissions (that occur within the UK’s borders) are now nearly 50 per cent down on their 1990 levels. There’s been progress in recent years, too: even dismissing the short-term drop in 2020 due to Covid, emissions in 2022 were 8 per cent down on their 2019 levels.
This is good news. It means the country is halfway to meeting its net-zero target by 2050, and at that pace, the UK is broadly on track. It’s also doing much better than many of its counterparts: for reference, emissions in the rest of the G7 have only reduced by 6 per cent since 1990.
But here’s the problem: the bulk of the cuts that have been achieved in recent decades were driven by a move away from carbon-intensive energy sources, like coal. The obvious point is that we cannot rely on this anymore: as coal’s share in the electricity mix is now very limited, the marginal room for improvement is small. And according to the Climate Change Committee, only 39 per cent of the required further emissions savings are backed up by credible plans or policies, which means we’ll end up far from net zero if no extra measures are taken.
Recent policy developments have largely put the emphasis on technological change and industry
Net zero seems to have dropped off the government’s agenda post-COP26 despite being ranked the fourth most important issue for voters (third for those aged under 50). The five priorities set out by Rishi Sunak earlier this year made no reference to climate change or to the need to cut carbon emissions. ‘Net Zero’ was only referred to once in his New Year’s speech, and in the Chancellor’s budget speech last month.
The policy developments (or announcements) that have occurred recently have focused on technological change and innovation. There seems to be a cross-party consensus on this: the one reference to environmental policy in both the Prime Minister’s and Chancellor’s speech was on low-carbon technology (like nuclear); and ‘Making Britain a clean energy superpower’ was also one of Starmer’s five missions.
There are indeed promising signs on this front. The uptake of electric vehicles, for instance, is well on track. By mid-2022, nearly 15 per cent of car sales were battery-powered, up from less than 2 per cent just four years ago. There has been a steady growth in offshore wind capacity, and ambitious investment in carbon capture and storage technologies.
The lack of long-term commitments and funding has meant progress in other areas has been slower
But if the UK is to meet its net-zero target, it can’t rely solely on a handful of sectors doing all the heavy lifting. What’s now needed is a much more radical shift across most sectors, including decarbonising buildings, and encouraging modal shift. The shortfalls here have largely been in funding.
There still isn’t a replacement for the scrapped £2bn Green Homes Grant Programme, which offered households grants to install energy efficiency measures. Building insulation rates have stalled, and are nowhere where they need to be. On the transport front, there have been some welcome announcements, like the second round of City Region Sustainable Transport Fund. But the £1.5bn a year it provides falls short of what’s needed, given the scale of the challenge, and pales in comparison to measures that make achieving net zero more difficult, like extending fuel duty freezes which costs the Exchequer twice as much.
Behaviour change is the real elephant in the room
Adaptive technology will only get us so far. Aside from funding issues, there’s also a gap in policy on how to encourage and facilitate greener lifestyles. The one thing that is too often ignored is the impact our built environment has on our carbon footprints. Transport is a good example of this: walking, cycling and operating a new bus route would all be much easier (and more viable) if more of us lived in dense, compact cities and neighbourhoods.
This partly explains why, as previous Centre for Cities research has shown, urban areas have a much lower carbon footprint than the rest of the country. It has crucial implications for how we plan, build, and manage our cities (and particularly on where we locate new developments). But neither the Net Zero Strategy, nor the Net Zero review, published at the end of last year, mentions the importance of the built environment. To give an example, recent housebuilding statistics show that the share of flats built (compared to houses) out of total completions has kept falling in the past 10 years (to less than 20 per cent), a sign that we’re not quite building at the right levels of density. If we are to truly accelerate the net zero transition, then this will need to change.
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