Last year, Germany’s industry and energy sector emitted fewer carbon emissions than had been expected. This welcome news, however, is a little deceiving. While there has been a growth in renewables, it is Germany’s stagnant economy that largely explains last year’s emissions drop.

These are the findings of Germany’s Council of Experts on Climate Change, an independent scientific body that advises the government on how to best to achieve its climate targets. The committee also prepares reports and projections on whether Germany’s climate policies are proving effective.

Germany wants to achieve net greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045 and even net-negative emissions from 2050. The measures taken to date, however, have clearly failed to achieve these goals, says Council of Experts on Climate Change chairwoman Barbara Schlomann.

The transport and building sectors are particularly far behind their climate targets.

On a positive note, Germany’s forests are showing some recovery. They not only form important ecosystems, but also serve as vital carbon sinks. This means they extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and convert them into biomass.

Yet the overall trend looks bleak. This is because ecosystems like forests, moors, grasslands and agricultural fields that ordinarily store carbon have become greenhouse emitters. This can, for instance, happen when bogs are drained, thereby releasing CO2 stored within them. If no action is taken, such carbon sinks will continuously transform into drivers of global warming by 2050. The German government had set itself the goal of reversing this concerning trend.

The Council of Experts on Climate Change, meanwhile, recommends that the government should consolidate its various climate protection policies into a coherent political strategy.

Council member Julia Pongratz says new approaches such as strengthening the circular economy and the electrification of industry as well as incentivizing sustainable eating habits are steps in the right direction, but far from sufficient.

Decision-makers should pay more attention to ensuring the societal costs and economic consequences of such measures are fairly distributed, she says.

The sectors with the strongest overall impact on Germany’s climate footprint are industry, energy and transport. The experts say that the latter could become far greener by switching to renewables and modernizing the electricity grid, battery and charging infrastructure.

Limited progress

After a German court forced the government to beef up its climate protection efforts, lawmakers presented an additional package of planned measures in March.

The program aims to accelerate the expansion of wind power, strengthen biofuels, promote electric vehicles (EVs) and local transport, and encourage the use of electricity instead of natural gas in industrial production.

Germany’s Council of Experts on Climate Change, however, believes that these steps don’t go far enough: “This means there is still no concrete route to actually achieve these [greenhouse gas emission] savings.” The experts warn that even if the emissions savings of this new program were achieved in full, Germany would still not reach its climate targets.

In addition, a whole host of infrastructure issues that still need to be resolved, Schlomann says. Moreover, efforts must be made to gain greater public acceptance for these climate measures, she adds.

German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, meanwhile, has put out a statement saying he takes the council’s findings seriously and will review them thoroughly.

He announced that it was now time to consistently implement the new climate action plan, especially by promoting the use of EVs.

“The most important response to the experts’ warning must now be to give full priority to renewable energies,” Schneider said. “A second key lever consists of reforming EU emissions trading.”

The latter step is expected to provide incentives for industry and the energy market to switch to electricity.

Germany’s Council of Experts on Climate Change is reviewing whether the government’s measures are compatible with the climate protection act, which has set out certain targets on the way to achieving net greenhouse gas neutrality.

This article was translated from German

Edited by R. Casey.