Australian national climate plan lands as countries struggle to meet targets

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Australia became the latest country to upgrade its national climate plan by promising to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 per cent by 2035, as a UN deadline looms for signatories to the Paris accord to lift their pace.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this would allow the country to “seize the economic opportunity” of the green transition.

But critics argued it fell “dangerously short” of what would be needed to avoid a breach of the ideal 1.5C goal set down in the accord, and a key threshold for neighbouring Pacific Islands

Experts said a cut of at least 75 per cent from the nation’s peak emissions levels in 2005 was needed. The Oil Change International campaign group said the plan also failed to include a road map for phasing out fossil fuel production and exports.

The country is competing against Turkey to host next year’s UN COP31 climate summit. It described the pledge to cut emissions by between 62 and 70 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035 as “ambitious, achievable, and in Australia’s national interests”.

The upgraded targets were required by the UN as part of the 2015 Paris agreement by February, but few countries have met the deadline. Many countries are now struggling to provide an improved national climate road map, known as a nationally determined contribution, by the end of September.

EU ministers are due to meet today to discuss the target, after blocking from countries such as France and Poland. China is also expected to release its plan within days, ahead of the UN climate summit in New York next week alongside the general assembly of leaders.

The new targets come amid rising concerns that countries are backsliding on climate action, in response to rollbacks of green policy under US President Donald Trump, as well as stretched budgets and a political pushback within their own countries.

“We want to continue to seize the economic opportunity that the energy transition offers our nation,” said Albanese. “I think we’ve hit the sweet spot. There will be criticism from some who say it’s too high, there’s some who will say that it’s too low.”

Shiva Gounden, head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the new climate plan was “an affront to communities across the Pacific and Australia facing the escalating impacts of dangerous climate change” and “prioritises fossil fuel profits and business interests over people”. WWF Australia also said it fell “dangerously short of what the science demands”.

Australia is already struggling to meet its existing commitment to hit a 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, with a number of large renewable projects failing to come to fruition in recent months.

The government is also under pressure to bail out a number of the country’s metals smelters, which use large amounts of energy, which are battling to remain viable as a result of high electricity costs.

Matt Kean, chair of Australia’s Climate Change Authority, said the target was within a “range that I am hopeful we can overachieve on”. It meant Australia would need to cut its emissions by half over the coming decade, he noted.

Former US top climate diplomat John Podesta said he believed the “world was moving forward” despite the “Trump administration’s self-destructive assault on clean energy and climate progress”.

He said Australia, Brazil, Japan, and the UK had come forward with plans that were “credibly tracking to net zero by 2050”.

“We now look to China, the world’s top emitter, to fully commit to the Paris Agreement it helped craft by issuing an NDC that charts a credible path to that country’s goal of net zero before 2060.”