Politics & Law

The Spanish government is to be taken to court for inaction on climate change in an initiative by NGOs which draws inspiration from recent rulings by the Dutch and Irish supreme courts requiring their governments to make greater efforts to reduce CO2 emissions

Counting for the first time CO2 removals by forests and land use in the EU’s emissions reduction target is overdue and would indirectly help to reduce biodiversity loss, vice-president Frans Timmermans has argued after the European Commission was accused of ‘accounting tricks’

Campaigners have slammed the European Parliament after it voted in favour of using EU funds for coal regions in transition to be spent on gas infrastructure, just days after MEPs on the environment committee demanded greenhouse gas emissions be cut to just two-fifths of 1990 levels by the end of the decade

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen confirmed she will push to upgrade the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction target to 55% by 2030 during her ‘state of the union’ speech

The European Commission wants to bring EU members’ greenhouse gas emissions to 55% below 1990 levels by the end of the decade, according to a leaked internal document, though one major campaign group warned the impact could be lessened by ‘accounting tricks’