UK climate targets are unachievable, Supreme Court rules

The United Kingdom’s progress on climate policy suffered another setback. It came on Friday, 3 May, when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that the new action plan may be impossible to implement. The reason is that the individual measures cannot be carried out using existing technologies, and that ministers were not informed that the action plan was too ambitious and unachievable. Reuters reported.

The UK Supreme Court’s ruling states that the carbon budgets set by the government in 2023 to meet the target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 were allegedly calculated without specific measures to ensure they could be met. This means the country will have to submit a new plan for a second time.

The non-profit organisations Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and Good Law Project took legal action against the targets and successfully challenged the previous budgets set by the Conservative government in 2022.

The Supreme Court then ruled that the United Kingdom had breached legislation designed to help achieve the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, requiring a new plan.

Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer for Friends of the Earth, said after the Supreme Court ruling that it was “another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans.”

These three environmental groups argued that the new plan was also unlawful because it had been approved on the basis of incorrect assumptions about its viability. They said that then energy minister Grant Shapps had not been informed of the risk that the emissions reduction plans might ultimately not be met. Judge Clive Sheldon upheld most of the grounds set out in the environmental groups’ legal challenge.

"The United Kingdom can be very proud of its record on climate change," a spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security said. They added that the objections were largely aimed at the process of achieving the targets and that the ruling contained no criticism of the detailed plans that had been drawn up.