The Netherlands must set higher climate ambitions and reduce greenhouse gas emissions more quickly. That writes the new advisory body the Scientific Climate Council on Wednesday in a letter to the Senate and House of Representatives. “To achieve this, the government must now prepare important choices and the climate policy that has been initiated must not be delayed,” the advisory body writes. The letter comes a week before the House of Representatives will decide which topics will be declared controversial and will therefore come to a standstill for the time being, because the cabinet is outgoing.
The Scientific Climate Council, in line with the European Scientific Climate Council, advises the Dutch government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2040 by 90 to 95 percent less than in 1990. According to the researchers, the advice is “justified in view of the available resources of the EU’ and ‘feasible’.
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The new advisory body emphasizes the importance of high climate ambitions in the letter. “In recent years, the world has increasingly been confronted with weather extremes: heat waves, droughts, heavy precipitation and floods, resulting in human suffering and enormous damage.” The researchers emphasize that the Netherlands has also experienced this. “Climate science is increasingly and with increasing certainty attributing weather extremes to global warming caused by human activity.”
Scientists also identify what the Dutch government and the European Union have already achieved with climate policy. For example, they write that Dutch greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were more than 30 percent lower than in 1990. And “where in 2014 the world was still heading for 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius warming in 2100, that course has now shifted to a expected warming of 2.2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius.” In the 2015 Paris Agreement, it was agreed to limit global warming to well below 2 °C, with a target of a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius.