Report on scientific advice for a 2040 climate target (GEN – 1494.00)

21 June 2023

GEN – 1494.00. On 15 June 2023, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change published its report ‘Scientific advice for the determination of an EU-wide 2040 climate target and GHG budget for 2030-2050’. It outlines possible pathways and related overarching policy choices.

Contents of the report

On 15 June 2023, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which was established by the European Climate Law, published its 110 pages report named ‘Scientific advice for the determination of an EU-wide 2040 climate target and GHG budget for 2030-2050’

In the report, the Advisory Board recommends EU GHG emission reductions of 90–95% by 2040 (relative to 1990). They also suggest a specific GHG emissions budget for the period of 2030-2050 of 11-14 Gt CO2e, in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C (with no or only limited and temporary exceedance of that temperature).

Major findings

The study assesses different scenarios considering their feasibility, including the environmental risks and challenges associated with short-term scale-up of technologies including for solar photovoltaics, wind power, and hydrogen energy. It also assesses the fairness of the EU’s contribution to global emissions reduction efforts under different ethical principles.

The findings are based on GHG emissions scenarios for achieving climate neutrality of the EU by 2050, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. The report also outlines possible pathways and related overarching policy choices to achieve the necessary emission reductions.

The analysis largely echoes the conclusions from the underlying literature and IPCC assessments that climate action can contribute to multiple improvements in health, well-being and environmental protection, and that it can also produce trade-offs in these same areas that need to be addressed and managed by policymakers. Implementation of the iconic pathways would reduce future climate risks, thus reducing future adaptation costs and losses and damages.

The analysis also goes beyond the IPCC conclusions by demonstrating that the three iconic pathways have important differences in their respective synergy and trade-off profiles. In particular, and it shows that focussing on demand-side actions that promote modest use of natural resources offers more synergies and fewer trade-offs across multiple SDGs.

Demand-side actions

The report concludes that on the energy demand side, a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings depends on efficiency and sufficiency measures. Efficiency is supported by the deployment of heat pumps to electrify space heating, cooling, and hot water supply as well as deep energy renovations, improving energy performance standards for new buildings (performance for heating, ventilation and air conditioning). Technology based mitigation is further enabled by, and often dependent on, socio-cultural and lifestyle changes that include sufficiency measures such as optimisation of the use of building, heating and cooling set-point adjustments, and reduced appliance use.

The study finally concludes that the decarbonisation of energy supply to buildings depends on switching from fossil gas to low-carbon electricity (with heat pumps), solar thermal energy, as well as low-carbon (renewable and waste heat) district heating solutions, including low temperature district heating.

Energy demand in residential and commercial sectors in 2040

According to the study, the final energy demand in residential and commercial sectors in 2040 will come from:

53-71% electricity
7-18% heat
0-11% bioenergy (6-9% solid biomass, 0-3% biogas, 0-3% biofuel)
0-27% fossil energy (5-20% natural gas, 4-7% oil, 0-1% coal).

Next steps

Following the publication, the Advisory Board will host a public webinar on 20 June at 14:00 to present the new report, which will be followed by a session with questions from the participants.

You can sign up the public webinar here. Please note that the webinar has limited availability, with only the first 150 people who sign up being able to participate directly in the webinar.

It will also be possible to livestream the webinar on the Advisory Board’s website.