A new assessment of Australia’s international climate change pledge has found it is behind other industrialised nations in having policies in place that can meet its promised 2030 target to cut greenhouse gases.
The analysis comes from the global project, the Carbon Action Tracker, a joint effort between four international environmental research groups to assess and compare action by each country to cut emissions.
The report said with only the conservative Liberal-National government’s Direct Action scheme and the renewable energy target installed at the national level, Australia was on track to fall short of its 2030 pledge and would in fact see emissions rise by the end of the next decade.
Earlier this month the government committed Australia to cutting emissions by 26 to 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 as part of its pledge ahead of a major United Nations climate conference in Paris later this year.
The Climate Action Tracker assessment also found the government’s moves to repeal the carbon price laws of the previous Labor government and scale-back the renewable energy target had made the 2030 goal significantly harder to achieve.
“Australia stands out as having the largest relative gap among industrialised nations between current policy projections for 2030 and the target,” the report said.
In its Australian review, released today, it deemed the country’s 2030 goal as “inadequate” and consistent with global warming of a devastating three to four degrees.
Countries have agreed through the UN to take collective action to halt global warming at two degrees above pre-industrial levels.
In announcing Australia’s new emissions target for 2030 earlier this month the government supplied indicative estimates of where its believes the emissions cuts to meet the goal could come from.
While Direct Action was forecast to deliver over a third of the effort needed, another significant proportion was attributed to yet to be developed plans to boost national energy and vehicle efficiency.
More carbon savings were lumped under the fairly ill defined category of “technology improvements and other sources of abatement.”
The government has said it will fully consider policies to meet the 2030 goal in two years time.
The Carbon Action Tracker analysis excludes the yet to be developed and implemented policies, and says it did not seek to quantify “technology improvements” because it would be speculative.
Factoring in projected reductions from the current direct action plan and renewable energy target, the analysis finds Australian emissions on track for an overall 27 per cent rise on 2005 levels by 2030.
The report also said the decision to repeal the carbon price and scale back the renewable energy target had increased the effort needed to meet the 2030 goal.
Before the carbon price repeal the analysis projects Australia was on track to be two-thirds closer to meeting its target.
Kornelis Blok of Ecofys, one of the groups behind Climate Tracker, said: “It is clear that Australia’s currently planned policies are inconsistent with its 2030 target. Australia needs to implement substantially more policies to meet that target.”
