Work underway - setting the WMCA carbon budget
Ensuring that balancing emissions is taken as seriously as balancing budgets
The WMCA’s ‘carbon budget’ – the maximum CO2 associated with energy use in WMCA area – is tethered to the UK’s Paris Agreement commitments. The latest scientific consensus on climate change in the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C (28) is used as the starting point for setting sub-national carbon budgets that enable the UK to meet this commitment. Shipping and aviation are not included, as both are being dealt with in a separate, national carbon budget for those activities. Land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) should be seen as a separate piece of work, focused on increasing carbon sequestration from these sources.
Based on these parameters, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research suggests that a budget of 126 million tonnes (MtCO2) for the years 2020 to 2100 should amount to a fair contribution. The zero carbon year (2041) is defined as the point at which WMCA’s annual average CO2 emissions fall below a threshold level of 0.9 MtCO2 – over 96% lower than 2015 levels.
Given that WMCA used 21MtCO2 in 2016, this will be a huge challenge – if we carried on emitting at that level, we would blow the entire budget in six years, and lock in 3-4 degrees of warming.
(28). See https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/