Lawyers warns that climate law is not driving the progress needed

THE UK’S world-leading climate legislation is not currently “driving the kind of progress we need” on cutting carbon, environmental lawyers have claimed.

The Climate Change Act, which commits the UK to a legally binding target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, is marking its 10th anniversary this month.

Jonathan Church, a lawyer for ClientEarth, the environmental legal charity which has successfully taken the Government to court on air pollution, said the UK was off-track to meet future “carbon budgets” to cut greenhouse gases under the Act.

The Government could be taken to court for not taking enough action to ensure the UK meets its five yearly budgets in the 2020s and 2030s. Mr Church said there were “real concerns” that the Act is “not driving the kind of progress we need”, and warned the carbon budgets could be missed without a real change of approach.

He added: “From a practical perspective, once you’ve missed a carbon budget, you’ve missed it – you can’t go back in time, you can’t take the emissions back out of the air, so a big part of our approach is trying to ensure we do not get to that point.”

Since the Act became law in 2008, the world has secured a global deal on tackling climate change, the Paris Agreement, which will require countries to cut emissions to zero overall by the second half of the century. Mr Church welcomed the Government’s recent move to ask its climate advisory body to look at a net zero target. But while strong ambition is essential, there was a need to address the “persistent absence of really transformative policy”, he said.