Minister of Climate Kai Mykkänen (NCP) and Minister for Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen (NCP) talked during a plenary session in the Parliament House in Helsinki on 1 December 2023. (Antti Aimo-Koivisto – Lehtikuva)
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FINLAND may be struggling to reach the climate targets of the EU for 2030, but Minister of Climate and the Environment Kai Mykkänen (NCP) is prepared to increase the level of ambition significantly for the next decade.
“My own starting point is provisionally that we as the EU should strive for a 90-per-cent drop in emissions in 2040,” he said to Helsingin Sanomat in Brussels on Monday.
The European Commission is presently drafting its proposal for climate targets for the next decade, and the expectation is that will demand that the pace of emission reductions be accelerated. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has recommended that the target be set to 90–95 per cent, receiving support from the European Commissioner for Climate Action, Wopke Hoekstra.
The current target is to reduce emissions from the level of 1990 by 55 per cent by 2030.
Mykkänen on Monday revealed that he stressed to his colleagues that setting the target to 90 per cent will require that the union reform its climate policy in a way that promotes the adoption of more cost-efficient reduction measures across Europe.
“It can’t be that the burden-sharing sector is divided so that some member states have a 10-per-cent goal for emission reductions and others a 50-per-cent one, like Finland and Sweden currently do,” he said to the newspaper.
As the 27-country bloc is mulling over additional climate measures, several of its members are struggling to reach the current 55-per-cent target.
The European Commission on Monday published its assessments of the climate and energy plans of 21 member states, concluding that additional measures are necessary. Also the Finnish plan was deemed insufficient: it, for example, fails to demonstrate how the country intends to halve emissions in the burden-sharing sector, which includes emissions from agriculture, heating and transport.
The key challenge for the country, however, is the continuing contraction of the carbon sink of forests, a development that is leaving it further and further behind the union-wide goal to grow carbon sinks.
“Net removals have, notably, been diminishing since 2015, culminating in net emissions in 2021, underscoring the need for climate action,” reads the assessment for Finland.
The European Commission has asked Finland to submit a concrete plan, with both new measures and estimates of their impact, for strengthening carbon sinks in the land-use sector by next summer. Mykkänen said the government will make a decision on measures to strengthen carbon sinks in its energy and climate strategy, which is to be drawn up next autumn.
“This government has to adopt new measures to strengthen sinks,” he conceded.
Statistics Finland last week published preliminary data indicating that emissions from the land-use sector have continued to increase, with the emissions exceeding removals by 4.5 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalents. The sector was earlier estimated to have returned to a net sink by the narrow margin of one million tonnes.
Mykkänen on Sunday stated to Helsingin Sanomat that the news does change the calculations of the government dramatically.
“This doesn’t swing the scale significantly,” he said, reminding that a one-million-tonne sink would have been far from sufficient. “The basic problem is that the carbon sink can’t be close to zero.”
The news also does not jeopardise the national carbon-neutrality goal for 2035, according to Mykkänen.
The total emissions of the country declined by three per cent last year. Mykkänen said it is positive that emissions from transport decreased despite the government decision to temporarily lower the distribution obligation for renewable fuels.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
