Europe’s Plan to Achieve Net-Zero Emissions in a Complex World – State of the Planet

Last week, the Columbia Climate School Signature Speaker Series welcomed Hans Bruyninckx, former executive director of the European Environmental Agency, to talk about “The European Green Deal: The pathway to net-zero emissions in a complex global context.”

Bruyninckx gave a primer on the current challenges and opportunities the E.U. is facing when it comes to climate change impact and mitigation—and why what happens next is so important.

When his PowerPoint presentation hit an initial snag, Bruyninckx was ready with a quip about how this was lesson number one: “Technology alone is not the solution to climate change.”

In all seriousness, “Whatever we do in Europe is based on global scientific assessments and reports that bring science to policy,” he began. “All these reports say the same thing: It’s the pivotal decade. You wouldn’t tell by looking at the policies…in many places. We are already living in a time of irreversibilities.”

We are facing profound tipping points in Earth systems, he continued, but also in our social and ecological systems, which are all interconnected. A typical discussion in Europe at the moment, Bruyninckx said, is what this means for the social dimension—in other words, which countries will benefit from an energy transition and who will pay for mitigation and emissions reduction policies? 

The conclusion we have drawn is that most of the current institutions we have in place “do not address the fundamental unsustainability of our systems of production and consumption,” he said.

Bruyninckx told the audience he has a daughter who is 17—and the popular discourse around mitigating climate change is at least twice her age. “When she asked me ‘What are the results [from those three decades]?’ Well, ‘60% more emissions [since 1990],’” he said.

Europe is trying to change these statistics—arguably with some success. In 2022, they achieved a 33% reduction in emissions compared with 1990 levels.

The idea of the Green Deal and with climate change policies, Bruyninckx said, is “we need to focus on the most resource and energy intensive systems that provide for society—the food system, the energy system, the mobility system and the built environment. And we need to rethink and reconfigure them at system-level, not at the level of fragmented approaches and not at the level of efficiency gains.”

The European Green Deal is ambitious, with goals including becoming the first climate-neutral continent, a target of reducing emissions by 55% (compared with 1990) by 2030, a new circular economy action plan, a zero-pollution strategy, a just transition, among others.

Europe is heating up twice as fast as average, Bruyninckx explained. For one thing, he added, half of the territory of Europe is marine environment, so sea temperature rise is having a tremendous impact. The continent is also affected by melting glaciers, which might disappear along with their functional contribution to the freshwater cycle by 2050, he said. And the extreme heat waves and droughts we’ve been seeing recently, they are no longer exceptional, Bruyninckx continued: “This is the new normal.”

“We are increasingly looking at a transition from extreme weather events to extreme societal events,” he said. “If the insurance companies take their hands off of insuring houses in Florida [and other disaster-prone areas]—which the biggest insurance companies are now doing—it’s shifting the balance in many other ways. This is really important.”

We’re also seeing big oil companies profiting tremendously in recent years off fossil fuels while we struggle to get a $100 billion climate fund together, Bruyninckx said; even though the World Economic Forum has stated that “we could save 1 trillion in fossil fuel costs if we would go green in our energy system.”

Our goal in Europe now is “Fit for 55,” or to reduce emissions by at least 55% by 2030, he said, which requires working on climate, transport, energy and taxation and trade issues. “In principle, the policies that we have framed should get us to our target,” Bruyninckx told the audience. Implementation, however, is a different question. 

The inequality of emissions and climate change, and the fact that the poorest countries pay the highest costs for climate change, must continue to remain central to all of these plans.

Finally, there are reasons for optimism, Bruyninckx said. “But is optimism really the issue? I usually say I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist, in the words of Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the E.U.”

In the face of many not-so-pleasant facts he reads daily about the climate, Bruyninckx added, “I’m determined. I try to use my agency [as an individual] day to day by doing what I can do to be involved in this motivating European agenda.”