London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2025

EU accused of climate accounting tricks

EU accused of climate accounting tricks

The bloc says it’s doing more to cut emissions, but environmentalists aren’t convinced.
There's some hocus-pocus going on with the emissions reduction numbers the European Union is proudly touting at the COP27 climate summit, climate campaigners allege.

The EU says it's one of the few parties to the Paris Agreement to actually follow the rules and beef up its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) — U.N.-speak for the promises made under the 2015 pact. The bloc's original proposal was to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by the end of the decade, but three new rule changes boost that to 57 percent.

“The EU stands ready to update our NDC, reflecting this higher ambition ... So, don’t let anyone tell you, here or outside, that the EU is backtracking,” Frans Timmermans, the commissioner in charge of the bloc's Green Deal project, said in Sharm El-Sheikh on Tuesday.

But climate NGOs are lot more skeptical.

They charge that amendments made to the bloc's mammoth Fit for 55 project tweak numbers, but the actual CO2 pollution emitted by the bloc won't change. The crucial change is the contribution of negative emissions made under the revision of the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry Regulation (LULUCF), which calculates CO2 absorbed by land and forests — known as carbon sinks.

“Before the Climate Law, EU reduction targets were 'gross,' meaning they didn’t include removals from the land sink,” said Mark Preston Aragonès, policy adviser with Bellona, an industrial decarbonization NGO. “But now that there’s a net target, they can play around and pretend they’re doing more to cut emissions.”

He said a crucial flaw in how the EU estimates its new headline climate target of a 57 percent cut is that storing CO2 through natural sinks, like soil and forests, is a less permanent form of climate action than cutting greenhouse gas emissions altogether. That's because these ecosystems can be hit by natural disturbances, like fires, pests and drought, which reduces their absorption capacity.

Ulriikka Aarnio, senior climate and land use policy coordinator at the Climate Action Network-Europe, an NGO, said the revised LULUCF Regulation means, "the sink is now bigger than it was foreseen in the EU Climate Law, but it's on paper."

The European Commission declined to specifically comment on the NGOs' allegation that the updated 57 percent reduction target is an accounting trick.

The bloc's objective for CO2 removals was changed last week to reach 310 million tons by 2030, up from the earlier goal of 265 million tons.

But even if EU countries hit their national targets, the "atmospheric impact" of the reductions "won't truly be minus 310 million tons in 2030," Aarnio added, because the LULUCF Regulation allows EU countries to exclude counting some CO2 emissions from the land use and forestry sectors in specific cases, such as forest fires.

"With the flexibilities, you can discount emissions that you don’t put in your accounting book like natural disturbances, but these emissions are still going into the atmosphere," she said.

The EU's updated climate targets are also the result of two additional legislative changes: an update to the so-called Effort Sharing Regulation, which sets national targets for emissions not covered by the EU's Emissions Trading System; and a proposal to phase out CO2-emitting combustion engines by 2035.

"What’s happened is that through the agreement of the legislations I’ve mentioned, on emission-free cars by 2035, on the effort-sharing between member states on the reduction of emissions, and on empowering the natural environment to be better carbon sinks … these three measures combined ... end up with a reduction of 57 percent," Timmermans said. "So, it’s not a new target, it’s not formulating a new ambition, it’s just translating what we have decided into actual reduction numbers."

Even if the 57 percent reduction is real, that's still not enough to hit the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, complained Chiara Martinelli, a director of CAN Europe, arguing the bloc should cut its emissions by 65 percent by the end of the decade.

"This small increase announced today at COP27 doesn’t do justice to the calls from the most vulnerable countries at the frontlines," she said.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
×