Dr. Orla Kelleher:

On the reason for the delay, one elephant in the room is that what we have in the plans is the target and our likelihood of achieving the target based on existing measures. However, there is a gaping emissions gap between the policies we have planned so far and whether they are enough to meet the target. The big question is a political one. We need more climate action measures to concretely reduce emissions. Again, we have not seen a detailed fossil fuel phase-out plan that is mindful of a just transition or any sort of fossil fuel subsidies phase-out plan in any of these plans so far. What is severely lacking in these plans is quantified emission reduction measures where we can see that the numbers add up. Until now, we have not seen that. I think it requires some big political choices as to what additional measures we will take to close the emissions gap.

I will come back to the point my colleague, Dr. Alison Hough, made a moment ago about the recent climate rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

The court has been quite clear that, while member states have some discretion in choosing the measures they want to adopt to meet their targets, they have much less discretion in actually meeting those targets. The targets are a requirement of our human rights obligations.