Translating the EU’s long-term strategy into action also means engaging more deeply with the different opportunities, challenges and conditions to unlock specific challenges faced by individual Member States or sub-national regions. A common European approach to decarbonisation and common legislative tools are of course needed. However, the EU must also work harder to integrate the diversity of national opportunities and challenges that stems from the unique circumstances of each Member State into a common vision of the pathways to GHG neutrality. In the short and medium term, the EU will also need to revise its NDC by 2020 and again, more fundamentally, by 2025. This is essential both for EU’s own policies to be consistent with its 2050 goals. It is also essential to help maintain international momentum behind the Paris Agreement.
Key Messages
- The EU needs to develop a more “sector-strategy”-based policy framework to incentivise and enable deep and systemic changes in major emitting sectors to capital stock, infrastructure, business models, finance and consumer behaviour, consistent with the goal of GHG neutrality by 2050.
- The EU’s institutions will need to dialogue more with Member States to reveal these opportunities and challenges on the pathway to GHG neutrality. They will then need to identify ways for the EU to help Member States to unlock them.
- In 2020, at a minimum the EU can formalise its implicit target of at least “-45%” reductions that flows from the CEP. In addition, the EU has an opportunity to adopt new commitments in terms of deepening the transformations of major emitting sectors, consistent with its soon to be adopted new Long Term Strategy to 2050. For the NDC revision in 2025, an even more systematic translation of the LTS into enabling conditions will need to be prepared as part of a broader review of the Clean Energy Package.
