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Are the EU climate ambitions reflected on member-state level for greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy consumption shares?

Poschmann, Justus; Bach, Vanessa; Finkbeiner, Matthias

The aim of this paper is to review the objectives to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to increase the renewable energy share (RES) in gross final energy consumption from the European Commission (EC) and the related member state contributions to reflect their consistency. Therefore, a base year correction is applied and the impact of every country is derived with the help of a weighting process. As a result, the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) of 2018 results in a negative target gap of −11%, while the proposal from 2021 can either decrease the GHG deviation to −5% or fulfill the objective. Though some countries have consistent targets, the annual GHG reduction rate of the EU has to be tripled up to −3% per year until 2030. The required objective for RES is achievable but the growth rate has to be increased to 2% to fulfill the announced ambitions by 2030. Finally, if the most ambitious option in the proposed directive is chosen, only eight member states have consistent efforts aligned with the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target.
Published in: Energy Strategy Reviews, 10.1016/j.esr.2022.100936, Elsevier