UK climate change impacts, strategy and standards

What is it about?

In an era of global warming, international and national standards organisations play a pivotal role in accelerating climate action towards lower GHG emissions, protecting the planet, and adapting to anthropogenic climate change through sustainable practices. They are formulated in the context of world-wide, UN-sponsored efforts to limit climate change to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the 21st Century. In that context, the 2015 Paris Agreement stressed the need to achieve a transition pathway towards net-zero GHG emissions (i.e., carbon neutrality; balancing emissions with CO2 removal) by the mid-21st Century. In the period since 2010 successive UK governments have introduced consecutive decarbonisation strategies and targets for economy as a whole. They responded to the 2015 Paris Agreement by taking steps to adopt a net-zero GHG emissions target for 2050. Thus, in June 2019 they amended the original Climate Change Act (2008) in order to incorporate the new target; being one of the first European countries to make such a legally-binding commitment. However, the UK only releases ~1% of the total annual world CO2e budget currently, and climate change is principally influenced by GHG emissions discharged over the preceding century or so: the notional residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the UK government was anxious to show global leadership on climate change mitigation in the run-up to the UN Climate Change Summit (COP26) that it hosted, in partnership with Italy, in Glasgow (Scotland) in late 2021 . But it does not always make clear to its citizens the ethical basis of its net-zero GHG emissions policy or the actions that it intends to implement in order to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Britain was responsible for a major element of European cumulative or historical CO2 emissions (excluding the EU-27) over the period 1750-2022.

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Photo by Bruno Vieira on Unsplash

Photo by Bruno Vieira on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The present contribution describes a range of the key concepts in the climate change domain and their implications, embracing the phenomenon of ‘carbon leakage’ and related issues, along with GHG accounting methods, ‘carbon footprints’, and concomitant standards. Other associated notions have been explained, embracing consumption and production (or territorial) emissions, upstream emissions, and cumulative (or historical) versus annual emissions. Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), as well as the use of embodied energy and carbon datasets, which play an important role in determining carbon footprints, have been chronicled. Examples of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches are outlined, where the former has been given greater priority in the UK and elsewhere on the grounds of ‘prevention is better than cure’. In the mitigation domain, a number of advanced low-carbon energy technologies and various ‘circular economy’ interventions have been described. Adaptation planning, such as the UK NAP3 plan, can in principle provide important aids towards economic resilience, growth and opportunities; protection against flooding; reliable, sustainable energy and water supply; robust infrastructure; and even the production of food, whilst dealing with pests and diseases. Unfortunately, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) found that NAP3 actually falls “far short of what is required”. Across the board, ISO and British Standards in the area of climate change have played an important role in climate action, helping to monitor climate change, quantify GHG emissions, and promote good practice in environmental management. Their current development has been outlined; contributions that have been welcomed by international bodies like the UNFCCC Secretariat.

Perspectives