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Four key issues to watch in the EU’s carbon market reform
(EurActiv, 15 Apr 2021) EU carbon market emissions experienced a record fall last year, but when it comes to heavy industry, the effect is likely to be short-lived, writes Agnese Ruggiero.
Agnese Ruggiero is a Policy Officer at Carbon Market Watch, an NGO working on the long-term decarbonisation of Europe.
The latest EU carbon market emissions data released by European Commission on April 1 was not a joke. It shows the impact of the COVID pandemic and a total year-on-year emission reduction estimated at 13% for all installations and airlines covered by the EU carbon market.
However, data breakdown by Sandbag shows that pollution from industrial sectors, such as cement, chemicals, and steel fell by only around 7%, and this mostly due to the reduced output caused by the COVID pandemic. The power sector registered a drop of 15.6% while emissions from aviation plummeted by 63.8% (due to the grounding of flights and are expected to bounce back once travelling resumes).
In practice, this means that not only are industrial emission reductions lagging behind compared to the power sector, the pollution is also likely to rebound in the next few years.
This trend is not new. Unlike in the power sector, carbon pollution from heavy industry has hardly decreased since 2012. Without additional policies and measures, it is also not expected to go down until 2030. At the current pace, resource and energy-intensive industries are not expected to reach climate neutrality before 2060.
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EurActiv, 15 Apr 2021: Four key issues to watch in the EU’s carbon market reform
