Climate KIC position paper: EU long-term GHG emissions reduction strategy

As an active member of the community working to solve challenges presented by climate change, Climate KIC has published a position paper on the EU long term GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions reduction strategy. 

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, 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

Download the paper