EU Long Term GHG Emissions Reduction Strategies
As an active member of the community working to solve challenges presented by climate change, EIT Climate-KIC has published a position paper on the EU long term GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions reduction strategy.
EIT Climate-KIC is supported by the European Institute of innovation and Technology. We are one of six KICs acting together as global innovation leaders, delivering world-class solutions to societal challenges. The EIT brings together a large and diverse pan-European innovation community of partners from business, research, academia, public and private organisations. Collectively we operate across the entire value chain of innovation, from education to scale and have built a unique innovation ecosystem, providing pan-European added value.
For the EU long-term GHG emissions reduction strategy, EIT Climate-KIC believes:
- The EU should take a leadership role and demonstrate increased ambition towards achieving net zero- emissions, targeting a date much faster than 2050, and coherent with the Paris Agreement aim of 1.5°C.
- To achieve the speed and scale of decarbonisation now needed, the EU approach cannot be based on step-by-step incremental improvements, but rather must help trigger systemic change for decarbonisation. The EU long-term GHG emissions reduction strategy must create a much bolder vision for change in order to unlock the kind of mobilising environment and ‘call to arms’ that European actors need to accelerate innovation and transformation
- Systemic innovation is one way to do this. The EU long-term GHG emissions reduction strategy should be deliberately designed to encourage and enable a more cross-cutting systemic approach. This means focusing innovation around multiple drivers of change simultaneously: not only technological innovation, but also innovation in citizen engagement, behaviours and skills, finance, business models and policy.
- The transformation needs to happen across systems that are ‘harder’ to decarbonise – in cities, production, land-use and finance
- Efforts need to focus both on mitigation and adaptation measures, at the same time as placing well-being and equality at the heart of the solution.