The earlier target represents a loss for the German Greens who, ahead of a three-day party congress in Lyon this weekend, had pushed for the climate neutrality target to be delayed to 2045, according to amendments seen by POLITICO.
The election manifesto, which was adopted by a large majority of national delegations, warned that meeting these climate objectives “must not rely on false solutions such as geo-engineering.”
The Greens are at risk of losing about a third of their seats in the European Parliament at the EU election in June, while a backlash against Brussels’ green agenda has been sweeping across the Continent in recent weeks. The party’s response has been to redouble the push on its core demands for higher climate ambition.
The final manifesto, for example, calls for the EU energy system to rely on 100 percent renewable sources and to phase out all fossil fuels by 2040, “starting with coal by 2030.” It also calls on the EU to adopt a plan for phasing out “fossil gas and oil as early as 2035 and no later than 2040.”
That point is another loss for the German Greens, who had pushed for deleting phaseout dates for fossil gas and oil from the manifesto.
The Greens have also been fighting back against the conservatives’ and far right’s attacks blaming them for farmers’ current struggles and for forcing the green transition to quickly on the sector.
Over the weekend, the Greens amended their manifesto to respond to farmers’ discontent, saying they will campaign for “a new agricultural model that reduces emissions, protect the environment, and foster social justice.”
The text insists that “farmers should make a decent income of their work,” and that the Greens will push to “make sure farmers are not exposed to unfair competition from products not respecting the same standards, including those imported from third countries” — which have been key demands of farmers’ unions during the recent demonstrations.
Tomaž Vuk has the carbon. Now he just needs somewhere to send it.
Since 2020, Vuk, who sits on the board of the Salonit cement factory in Slovenia, has been plotting to get in on the ground floor of an industry poised to boom in the coming years: carbon capture.
It’s one of the ways carbon-spewing factories like the one Vuk helps run are supposed to keep operating in a greener future.
There’s just one problem: Vuk has nowhere to store any carbon he traps at the plant.
Salonit sits roughly 50 kilometers off the Gulf of Trieste, an Italian port nestled near the Adriatic Sea’s highest point. From there, Salonit can technically ship the carbon anywhere. But for now, it seems the only options are way up in the North Sea — a protracted (and, most notably, expensive) trip around the Continent.
Vuk said he’s willing to send the carbon wherever, but would of course prefer spots along the nearby Mediterranean and the Black Seas. For now, that’s not likely. So the North Sea it is.
“It might be acceptable to carry those costs for a short period of time until [closer] solutions are ready,” Vuk said.
The conundrum is a small example of a mounting problem for Europe as it races to establish the infrastructure needed to hit climate neutrality by 2050. The EU is heavily encouraging companies to invest in projects and technology that can either suck carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place. But that also means finding places to store all of that carbon.
So far, North Sea countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have dominated the industry — a fact the EU is aiming to change with new incentives and rules meant to create more storage across the bloc by 2030. But not everyone is convinced the plan will work, and some skeptics even wonder if carbon capture is really worth the sky-high investments required.
The stakes are high: Should the EU’s masterplan fail, landlocked, low-income European countries could be making investments now that never pay off, potentially taking down traditional manufacturing plants with them. That would leave the EU with an even greater economic divide — and another gap to fill in its green ambitions.
“There’s quite a risk, at least for industries in regions like Southern Central and Eastern Europe, where there are little project developments happening,” said Eadbhard Pernot, who leads the works on carbon capture for Clean Air Task Force, an NGO.“There’s a risk of deindustrialization in some parts of Europe and industrialization in other parts of Europe.”
Fragmented deployment
Over the past year, a flurry of carbon-sucking vacuums and vaults have been announced in the wealthy region bordering the North Sea. The area is home to some of Europe’s largest oil and gas sites, providing it with a plethora of places to both grab and store carbon.
In March, a project dubbed Greensand launched with the promise of first capturing carbon in Belgium before shipping it to a depleted oil field in the Danish North Sea — a project that could store 8 million tons of CO2 by 2030. And in May, the Danish Energy Agency awarded renewable utility Ørsted a 20-year contract for the Kalundborg Hub, which touts that it will remove up to half a million tons of carbon from nearby heat and power plants starting in 2026.
The Netherlands is also keeping pace. The Porthos project is slated to store no less than 2.5 million tons in depleted gas fields. And big emitters like Air Liquide, Air Products, ExxonMobil and Shell have secured storage on the site starting in 2026, when Porthos goes online.
The northern dominance is so vast that research has shown Denmark alone could develop enough storage capacity to meet the EU’s goal to erect 50 million tons of CO2 storage by 2030 — which Brussels proposed in its Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), a legislative effort to bolster the bloc’s manufacturing of green projects like wind turbines and solar panels.
The other nearby options are EU neighbors like Norway, Iceland and the U.K. While these sites might make sense geographically, they would also leave the EU increasingly dependent on outside countries for carbon storage — a future that Brussels wants to avoid.
Prisoners of geography
The northern dominance is starting to freak out policymakers and industry leaders across the rest of Europe. They fear it will eventually erode their industrial competitiveness in a future marked by soaring carbon prices and fierce competition from outside Europe.
Currently, high-polluting manufacturers like steel and cement makers, which have to pay for their emissions under the bloc’s CO2 market, are getting a free pass for their carbon pollution — a decision made to keep EU-based industries from being overwhelmed by costs their competitors don’t always bear.
That won’t last forever, however. Last year, EU negotiators struck a deal to phase out the policy by 2034, hoping to drive up carbon prices and push industries to invest in lower-emission options, including carbon capture.
“Many are yet to grasp the consequences of the reform of the EU’s carbon market,” one EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO.
Once these manufacturers are confronted with the full cost of their pollution, the diplomat argued, they will have an existential need for relatively cheap ways to absorb and store their carbon.
And those storage options are only cheap if they’re nearby.
The EU claims its plan will create these options. A proposal is in the works to spread carbon storage sites more evenly across Europe. The plan will also map out the transport needs for carbon to effectively get from where it is vacuumed up to its final resting place. The idea is to ensure that plants like Salonit aren’t left behind.
“To keep the costs of decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries at bay, Europe needs CO2 storage projects across the Continent,” said Eve Tamme, who chairs the Zero Emissions Platform, an organization advising the EU on carbon capture technology. “This helps to limit the need for expensive long-distance CO2 transportation routes.”
Work in progress
The European Commission, the EU’s executive in Brussels, also wants to encourage plants to invest in carbon trapping by guaranteeing that storage will be available.
Brussels has already called for countries to adopt a binding, EU-wide storage target of 50 million tons of CO2 by 2030 as part of its net-zero act. But the proposal has run into controversy over a clause that would force oil and gas producers to contribute to that goal.
Carbon storage leaders like Denmark and the Netherlands argued the provision would simply pull cash away from existing CO2 storage projects — benefiting fossil fuel giants in the process. Yet others countered that these are the exact companies that should be forced to help pack away the carbon after they spent years putting it in the sky.
In the end, Denmark and the Netherlands won, getting a narrowly written opt-out for oil and gas firms — but only if these quotas have been met with other projects.
Lina Strandvåg Nagell, senior manager at industrial decarbonization NGO Bellona, argued the compromise wouldn’t derail the overall ambition.
“This decision shows that storage will have to be developed across the EU,” she said.
And Brussels says the early signs are promising. In late November, Ditte Juul-Jørgensen, who heads the Commission’s energy department, said there were a growing number of carbon capture and storage projects in Southern and Eastern Europe in line to receive speedy approval and EU funding.
“Previously … projects were really situated mainly around the North Sea region,” she told an industry event. “But now they stretch from the Baltic to the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.”
But the question is whether the pace will be quick enough for people like Vuk, in Slovenia, and his fellow cement and steel compatriots across Central and Eastern Europe.
“Any action that would encourage” more carbon storage, he said, “is welcome.”
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
LONDON — World leaders will touch down in Dubai next week for a climate change conference they’re billing yet again as the final off-ramp before catastrophe. But war, money squabbles and political headaches back home are already crowding the fate of the planet from the agenda.
The breakdown of the Earth’s climate has for decades been the most important yet somehow least urgent of global crises, shoved to one side the moment politicians face a seemingly more acute problem. Even in 2023 — almost certainly the most scorching year in recorded history, with temperatures spawning catastrophic floods, wildfires and heat waves across the globe — the climate effort faces a bewildering array of distractions, headwinds and dismal prospects.
“The plans to achieve net zero are increasingly under attack,” former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, who set her country’s goal of reaching climate neutrality into law, told POLITICO.
The best outcome for the climate from the 13-day meeting, which is known as COP28 and opens Nov. 30, would be an unambiguous statement from almost 200 countries on how they intend to hasten their plans to cut fossil fuels, alongside new commitments from the richest nations on the planet to assist the poorest.
But the odds against that happening are rising. Instead, the U.S. and its European allies are still struggling to cement a fragile deal with developing countries about an international climate-aid fund that had been hailed as the historic accomplishment of last year’s summit. Meanwhile, a populist backlash against the costs of green policies has governments across Europe pulling back — a reverse wave that would become an American-led tsunami if Donald Trump recaptures the White House next year.
And across the developing world, the rise of energy and food prices stoked by the pandemic and the Ukraine war has caused inflation and debt to spiral, heightening the domestic pressure on climate-minded governments to spend their money on their most acute needs first.
Even U.S. President Joe Biden, whose 2022 climate law kicked off a boom of clean-energy projects in the U.S., has endorsed fossil fuel drilling and pipeline projects under pressure to ease voter unease about rising fuel costs.
Add to all that the newest Mideast war that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
On the upside, investment in much of the green economy is also surging. Analysts are cautiously opining that China’s emissions may have begun to decline, several years ahead of Beijing’s schedule.And the Paris-based International Energy Agency projects that global fossil fuel demand could peak this decade, with coal use plummeting and oil and gas plateauing afterward. Spurring these trends is a competition among powers such as China, the United States, India and the European Union to build out and dominate clean-energy industries.
But the fossil fuel industry is betting against a global shift to green, instead investing its profits from the energy crisis into plans for long-term expansion of its core business.
The air of gloom among many supporters of global climate action is hard to miss, as is the sense that global warming will not be the sole topic on leaders’ minds when they huddle in back rooms.
“It’s getting away from us,” Tim Benton, director of the Chatham House environment and society center, said during a markedly downbeat discussion among climate experts at the think tank’s lodgings on St James’ Square in London earlier this month. “Where is the political space to drive the ambition that we need?”
Fog of war
The most acute distraction from global climate work is the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflagration is among many considerations the White House is weighing in Biden’s likely decision not to attend the summit, one senior administration official told POLITICO this month. Other leaders are also reconsidering their schedules, said one senior government official from a European country, who was granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive diplomacy of the conference.
The war is also likely to push its way onto the climate summit’s unofficial agenda: Leaders of big Western powers who are attending will spend at least some of their diplomatically precious face-time with Middle East leaders discussing — not climate — but the regional security situation, said two people familiar with the planning for COP28 who could not be named for similar reasons. According to a preliminary list circulated by the United Arab Emirates, Israeli President Isaac Herzog or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend the talks.
A threat even exists that the conference could be canceled or relocated, should a wider regional conflict develop, Benton said.
The UAE’s COP28 presidency isn’t talking about that, at least publicly. “We look forward to hosting a safe, inclusive COP beginning at the end of November,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. But the strained global relations have already thrown the location of next years’ COP29 talks into doubt because Russia has blocked any EU country from hosting the conference, which is due to be held in eastern or central Europe.
The upshot is that the bubble of global cooperation that landed the Paris climate agreement in 2015 has burst. “We have a lot of more divisive narratives now,” Laurence Tubiana, the European Climate Foundation CEO who was one of the drafters of the Paris deal, said at the same meeting at Chatham House.
The Ukraine war and tensions between the U.S. and China in particular have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, Benton told POLITICO in an email.
Now, “the Hamas-Israel war potentially creates significant new fault lines between the Arab world and many Western countries that are perceived to be more pro-Israeli,” he said. “The geopolitical tensions arising from the war could create leverage that enables petrostates (many of which are Muslim) to shore up the status quo.”
Add to that the as yet unknown impact on already high fossil fuel commodity prices, said Kalee Kreider, president of the Ridgely Walsh public affairs consultancy and a former adviser to U.S. Vice President Al Gore. “Volatility doesn’t usually help raise ambition.”
The Biden administration’s decisions to approve a tranche of new fossil fuel production and export projects will undermine U.S. diplomacy at COP28, said Ed Markey, a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
“You can’t preach temperance from a barstool, and the United States is running a long tab,” he said.
U.N. climate talks veterans have seen this program before. “No year over the past three decades has been free of political, economic or health challenges,” said former U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa, who now heads the consulting firm onepoint5. “We simply can’t wait for the perfect conditions to address climate change. Time is a luxury we no longer have — if we ever did.”
The EU backlash
Before the Mideast’s newest shock to the global energy system, the war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s energy dependence on Russia — and initially galvanized the EU to accelerate efforts to roll out cleaner alternatives.
But in the past year, persistent inflation has worn away that zeal. Businesses and citizens worry about anything that might add to the financial strain, and this has frayed a consensus on climate change that had held for the past four years among left, center and center right parties across much of the 27-country bloc.
In recent months, conservative members of the European Parliament have attacked several EU green proposals as excessive, framing themselves as pragmatic environmentalists ahead of Europe-wide elections next year. Reinvigorated far-right parties across the bloc are also using the green agenda to attack more mainstream parties, a trend that is spooking the center.
Germany’s government was almost brought down this year by a law that sought to ban gas boilers — with the Greens-led economy ministry retreating to a compromise. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has joined a growing chorus agitating for a “regulatory pause” on green legislation.
If Europe’s struggles emerge at COP28, the ripple effect could be global, said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank.
The “EU has established itself as the global laboratory for climate neutrality,” he said. “But now it needs to deliver on the experiment, or the world (which is closely watching) will assume this just does not work. And that would be a disaster for all of us.”
U.K. retreats
The world is also watching the former EU member that stakes a claim to be the climate leader of the G7: the U.K.
London has prided itself on its green credentials ever since former Prime Minister May enacted a 2019 law calling for net zero by 2050 — making her the first leader of a major economy to do so.
According to May’s successor Boris Johnson, net zero was good for the planet, good for voters, good for the economy. But under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the messaging has transformed. Net zero remains the target — but it comes with a “burden” on working people.
In a major speech this fall, Sunak rolled back plans to ban new petrol and diesel car sales by 2030, bringing the U.K. into line with the EU’s 2035 date. With half an eye on Germany’s travails, he said millions of households would be exempted from the gas boiler ban expected in 2035.
In making his arguments for a “pragmatic” approach to net zero, Sunak frequently draws on the talking points of net zero-skeptics. Why should the citizens of the U.K., which within its own borders produces just 1 percent of global emissions, “sacrifice even more than others?”
The danger, said one EU climate diplomat — granted anonymity to discuss domestic policy of an allied country — was that other countries around the COP28 negotiating table would hear that kind of rhetoric from a capital that had led the world — and repurpose it to make their own excuses.
Sunak’s predecessor May sees similar risks.
“Nearly a third of all global emissions originate from countries with territorial emissions of 1 per cent or less,” May said. “If we all slammed on the brakes, it would make our net zero aspirations impossible to achieve.”
Trump’s back
The U.S., the largest producer of industrial carbon pollution in modern history, has been a weathervane on climate depending on who controls its governing branches.
When Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, it created a major drag on Biden’s promise to provide $11.4 billion in annual global climate finance by 2024.
Securing this money and much more, developing countries say, is vital to any progress on global climate goals at COP28. Last year, on the back of the pandemic and the energy price spike, global debt soared to a record $92 trillion. This cripples developing countries’ ability to build clean energy and defend themselves against — or recover from — hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires.
Even when the money is there, the politics can be challenging. Multibillion-dollar clean energy partnerships that the G7 has pursued to shift South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and India off coal power are struggling to gain acceptance from the recipients.
Yet even more dire consequences await if Trump wins back the presidency next year.
A Trump victory would put the world’s largest economy a pen stroke away from quitting the Paris Agreement all over again — or, even more drastically, abandoning the entire international regime of climate pacts and summits. The thought is already sending a chill: Negotiations over a fund for poorer countries’ climate losses and damage, which Republicans oppose, include talks on how to make its language “change-of-government-proof” in light of a potential Trump victory, said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states.
More concretely for reining in planet-heating gases, Trump would be in position to approve legislation eliminating all or part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden’s signature climate law included $370 billion in incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and other carbon-cutting efforts – though the actual spending is likely to soar even higher due to widespread interest in its programs and subsidies – and accounts for a bulk of projected U.S. emissions cuts this decade.
House Republicans have attempted to claw back parts of Biden’s climate law several times. That’s merely a political messaging effort for now, thanks to a Democrat-held Senate and a sure veto from Biden, but the prospects flip if the GOP gains full control of Congress and White House.
Under a plan hatched by Tubiana and backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, countries would in the future log their state and local government climate plans with the U.N., in an attempt to undergird the entire system against a second Republican blitzkrieg.
The U.S. isn’t the only place where climate action is on the ballot, Benton told the conference at Chatham House on Nov. 1.
News on Sunday that Argentina had elected as president right-wing populist Javier Milei — a Trump-like libertarian — raised the prospect of a major Latin American economy walking away from the Paris Agreement, either by formally withdrawing or by reneging on its promises.
Elections are also scheduled in 2024 for the EU, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Russia, and possibly the U.K.
“A quarter of the world’s population is facing elections in the next nine months,” he said. “If everyone goes to the right and populism becomes the order of the day … then I won’t hold out high hopes for Paris.”
Zack Colman reported from Washington, D.C. Suzanne Lynch also contributed reporting from Brussels.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
The EU’s joint presidents flew to last year’s U.N. climate talks in Egypt aboard a private jet, according to data seen by POLITICO that revealed heavy use of private flights by European Council President Charles Michel.
The flight data, received through a freedom of information request, shows that Michel traveled on commercial planes on just 18 of the 112 missions undertaken between the beginning of his term in 2019 and December 2022.
He used chartered air taxis on some 72 trips, around 64 percent of the total, including to the COP27 talks in Egypt last November and to the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021. Michel invited Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the flight to Egypt.
The EU presidents’ choice of transportation to the climate talks highlights a long-standing dilemma for global leaders: how to practice what they preach on greenhouse gas emissions while also facing a demanding travel schedule that makes private aviation a tempting option — even a necessary evil.
When Michel, a former Belgian prime minister, arrived in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, he delivered a sober message to the gathered climate dignitaries: “We have a climatic gun to our head. We are living on borrowed time,” he said, before adding: “We are, and will remain, champions of climate action.”
According to the NGO Transport & Environment, a private jet can emit 2 tons of planet-cooking CO2 per hour. That means during the five-hour return flight to Sharm El-Sheikh, Michel and von der Leyen’s jet may have emitted roughly 20 tons of CO2 — the average EU citizen emits around 7 tons over the course of a year.
Most COP27 delegates — including the EU’s Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans, according to a Commission official — took commercial flights normally packed with sun-seeking tourists.
The decision to travel to Egypt by private jet was made after no commercial flights were available to return Michel to Brussels in time for duties at the European Parliament, his spokesperson Barend Leyts told POLITICO.
Staff also explored the option of flying aboard Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo’s plane, but it was scheduled to return before Michel’s work at COP27 would be completed.
Unlike many national governments, the EU does not own planes to transport its leaders. Hiring a private jet was “the only suitable option in the circumstances,” said Leyts. “Given that the president of the Commission was also invited to the COP27, we proposed to share a flight.”
Leyts stressed that the flight complied with internal Council rules, which dictate that officials should fly commercial when possible.
A spokesperson from the Commission confirmed that the famously hostile pair had shared the cabin to Sharm El-Sheikh, noting that reaching the destination by commercial flight was difficult due to the high volume of traffic and von der Leyen’s packed schedule.
“The fact that both presidents traveled together, with their teams, shows that they did what was possible to optimize the travel arrangements and reduce the associated carbon footprint,” added the Commission’s spokesperson.
The Commission previously told POLITICO that von der Leyen’s use of chartered trips is limited to “exceptional circumstances,” such as for security reasons or if a commercial flight isn’t available or doesn’t fit with diary commitments. The institution has previously declined POLITICO’s request to share detailed information on the modes of transportation used by the Commission chief for her foreign trips.
As part of its climate goals, the EU is looking to tighten its rules on staff travel to encourage greener modes of transport and bring down the institution’s emissions.
The Commission is aiming to achieve climate neutrality by 2030 by switching to “sustainable business travel,” favoring greener travel options and encouraging employees to cycle, walk or take public transport to work.
Leyts said Michel’s staff enquired about the possibility of using sustainable aviation fuel, but were “regrettably” told that neither Brussels nor Sharm El-Sheikh airports had provision.
Since 2021, Michel has offset the emissions of his flights through a scheme that funds a Brazilian ceramics factory to switch its fuel from illegal timber to agricultural and industrial waste products, according to Leyts. Since 2022, that has applied to all of his flights.
One year of war in Ukraine has left deep scars — including on the country’s natural landscape.
The conflict has ruined vast swaths of farmland, burned down forests and destroyed national parks. Damage to industrial facilities has caused heavy air, water and soil pollution, exposing residents to toxic chemicals and contaminated water. Regular shelling around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, means the risk of a nuclear accident still looms large.
The total number of cases of environmental damage tops 2,300, Ukraine’s environment minister, Ruslan Strilets, told POLITICO in an emailed statement. His ministry estimates the total cost at $51.45 billion (€48.33 billion).
Of those documented cases, 1,078 have already been handed over to law enforcement agencies, according to Strilets, as part of an effort to hold Moscow accountable in court for environmental damage.
A number of NGOs have also stepped in to document the environmental impacts of the conflict, with the aim of providing data to international organizations like the United Nations Environment Program to help them prioritize inspections or pinpoint areas at higher risk of pollution.
Among them is PAX, a peace organization based in the Netherlands, which is working with the Center for Information Resilience (CIR) to record and independently verify incidents of environmental damage in Ukraine. So far, it has verified 242 such cases.
Left: Hostomel, Ukraine, after a Russian assault. Right: Port of Mykolaiv after a Russian strike | Imagery courtesy of Planet Labs PBC
“We mainly rely on what’s being documented, and what we can see,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, a humanitarian disarmament project leader with PAX. Information comes from social media, public media accounts and satellite imagery, and is then independently verified.
“That also means that if there’s no one there to record it … we’re not seeing it,” he said. “It’s such a big country, so there’s fighting in so many locations, and undoubtedly, we are missing things.”
After the conflict is over, the data could also help identify “what is needed in terms of cleanup, remediation and restoration of affected areas,” Zwijnenburg said.
Rebuilding green
While some conservation projects — such as rewilding of the Danube delta — have continued despite the war, most environmental protection work has halted.
“It is very difficult to talk about saving other species if the people who are supposed to do it are in danger,” said Oksana Omelchuk, environmental expert with the Ukrainian NGO EcoAction.
That’s unlikely to change in the near future, she added, pointing out that the environment is littered with mines.
Before and after flooding in the Kyiv area, Ukraine | Imagery courtesy of Planet Labs PBC
Agricultural land is particularly affected, blocking farmers from using fields and contaminating the soil, according to Zwijnenburg. That “might have an impact on food security” in the long run, he said.
When it comes to de-mining efforts, residential areas will receive higher priority, meaning it could take a long time to make natural areas safe again.
The delay will “[hinder] the implementation of any projects for the restoration and conservation of species,” according to Omelchuk.
And, of course, fully restoring Ukraine’s nature won’t be possible until “Russian troops leave the territory” she said.
Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol before and after a Russian attack |Imagery courtesy of Planet Labs PBC
Meanwhile, Kyiv is banking that the legal case it is building against Moscow will become a potential source of financing for rebuilding the country and bringing its scarred landscape and ecosystems back to health.
It is also tapping into EU coffers.In a move intended to help the country restore its environment following Russia’s invasion, Ukraine in June became the first non-EU country to join the LIFE program, the EU’s funding instrument for environment and climate.
Earlier this month, Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius announced a €7 million scheme — dubbed the Phoenix Initiative — to help Ukrainian cities rebuild greener and to connect Ukrainian cities with EU counterparts that can share expertise on achieving climate neutrality.
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Louise Guillot, Antonia Zimmermann and Giovanna Coi
LONDON — It took one bruising campaign defeat and six weeks of exile — but on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak will finally become U.K. prime minister.
He faces the toughest in-tray of any British leader since World War II, entering No. 10 Downing Street as the country hurtles into winter with energy bills, hospital waiting lists, borrowing costs and inflation all soaring.
The challenge has been magnified by Liz Truss’ brief crash-and-burn premiership. As a result of her now-infamous mini-budget, which was scrapped almost in its entirety after causing chaos in financial markets, the Conservatives are trailing the opposition Labour Party by over 30 percentage points in opinion polls.
On Monday, Sunak told MPs he was ready to hit the ground running as he addressed them for the first time since becoming Tory leader. Over the days and months ahead, he will need to carry out his first ministerial reshuffle without further fracturing his party; oversee the first budget since the last one wreaked havoc on the economy; and determine what support to offer voters with their energy bills past this spring.
Prime ministers tend to think of their first 100 days as a way to set the tone for their premierships. For Sunak, who has just over two years to govern before he is required to face a general election, that first impression is going to be particularly important.
October 25 — Meeting with the king and first speech outside No. 10 Downing Street
Sunak will become the prime minister Tuesday after an audience with King Charles III, where he will ask the monarch for permission to form a government.
Sunak will then address the country for the first time as prime minister from the steps outside No. 10 Downing Street at around 11.35 a.m.
To much of the British public, the former chancellor is a familiar face who announced the wildly-popular furlough scheme during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
His task now will be to reassure people that the government will support them during another difficult economic period — only this time he is in a much tougher position. The popularity he gained during the pandemic has waned, and he is taking over after a major government crisis — the third Tory prime minister to hold office within three months.
October 25 — First reshuffle
The first big political test for Sunak will be his Cabinet reshuffle. Tory MPs believe he will learn the lesson from Truss’ first and only one, where she divvied up roles between her allies and left almost everyone who didn’t back her out in the cold.
“I think his reshuffle will be more unifying, bringing in people from all wings and will not be as destabilizing as Liz’s,” an MP who did not back Sunak predicted.
Sunak’s leadership rival Penny Mordaunt is expected to be handed a major Cabinet position | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Sunak is likely to make at least his major Cabinet appointments Tuesday afternoon, so they are in place to line up alongside him on the House of Commons’ front bench when MPs grill him during so-called prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on Wednesday.
His biggest decision will be whether to keep Jeremy Hunt — who was drafted in by Truss in a last-ditch effort to save her premiership — as chancellor. He is also likely to hand a big job to his leadership rival Penny Mordaunt.
Close Sunak allies who are likely to get promotions include Mel Stride, the current chairman of the Treasury select committee, Craig Williams, Claire Coutinho and Laura Trott. Tory big beast Michael Gove could see a return to Cabinet.
October 26 — First PMQs
Sunak will go head-to-head as prime minister with Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, for the first time on Wednesday.
Unlike his predecessor, Sunak won’t have much to worry about from his own side — Tory MPs have largely rowed behind him since he became their leader on Monday, with many expressing relief that the perpetual state of crisis of the Truss government has ended.
But MPs will want him to demonstrate that he can land blows against Starmer at a time when Labour is streets ahead in the polls. Sunak told Tory MPs on Tuesday that their party faced an “existential threat” as a result of its low poll ratings.
October 28 — Deadline to form a government in Belfast
If a power-sharing arrangement is not in place at Stormont by Friday, a fresh set of elections to the Northern Irish assembly will have to be triggered.
Calling these elections — the second set in seven months — could be one of the Sunak government’s first acts and an indication of successive Tory prime ministers’ failure to deal with the political crisis in Northern Ireland.
The Democratic Unionist Party issued a fresh warning on Monday night that it would not participate in the assembly unless Sunak takes action on the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol agreed with the EU.
October 31 — First budget
The next budget was penciled in for October 31 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the Truss-era chancellor who wanted to use it to reassure financial markets still reeling from his last one.
The timing of the budget — widely derided by Tory MPs because of the optics of holding it on Halloween — was intended to give the Bank of England time to react before its own key meeting on November 3, where it will set interest rate levels for the weeks ahead.
In its biggest test so far, Sunak’s government will have to decide whether to stick with that date; what actions to take to reassure the markets; and how to fill the enormous hole in the U.K. public finances.
Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “If his chancellor is Jeremy Hunt and Sunak is comfortable with the way things are proceeding for next Monday, then going ahead has lots of advantages.
“You get the announcement out before the Bank of England makes its next inflation figure, and you get the Office for Budgetary Responsibility forecasts out there, which helps show the markets you are serious about them.
“The case for changing that date is much stronger if Sunak says, ‘Actually, I want to do something different to what Jeremy Hunt has been planning, and I need more time,’” Emmerson added.
November 3 — Bank of England rates meeting
The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee is expected to raise interest rates at its meeting on November 3, triggering a fresh hike in people’s mortgages.
This is the point when many people will realize for the first time that they will have to make much larger mortgage repayments once their current fixed-rate deals come to an end.
Sunak made combating inflation and keeping mortgages low a central theme of his leadership campaign over the summer. Reacting to the rates decision and ensuring the government works closely with the Bank of England to combat inflation will be a key test of his premiership.
November 6 — COP27 summit in Egypt
Sunak made a point of telling Tory MPs on Tuesday that he is committed to the U.K.’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The question now is whether he attends the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Truss reportedly planned to go, despite her skepticism of aspects of the net-zero agenda.
If Sunak does go to Egypt, it could be his first foreign trip in office (unless he decides to make a quick visit to Ukraine beforehand) and his first opportunity to present himself on the world stage.
November 8 — Boundary changes
The Boundary Commission for England will publish its new constituency map on November 8.
At this point, some Tory MPs will know with near certainty that their constituencies are being carved up between neighboring areas, with some forced to jostle with colleagues over who will get to stand where.
It will be a political headache for Sunak to deal with, and any MPs whose safe seats become marginal will sense their political careers coming to an end — and will have less of an incentive to support him in key votes in the months ahead.
November 13 — G20 meeting in Indonesia
The next big foreign trip coming down the track is the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia.
The meeting will be an opportunity for Western powers to present a united front against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and against China’s increased aggression toward Taiwan, but also to hold talks behind closed doors. There have been reports that both China’s Xi Jinping and Russian Vladimir Putin will attend.
Sophia Gaston, the head of foreign policy at the Policy Exchange think tank, said this was shaping up to be “one of the most extraordinary summits of modern history, with a violent war raging in Ukraine and the leading protagonist, Vladimir Putin, on the guest list alongside other autocratic leaders and outraged democratic allies.”
“As well as promoting free trade and the rules-based international order, Sunak would likely see the G20 as an opportunity to build support for his proposed ‘NATO-style’ technology alliance,” Gaston said. “He may well also debut a new U.K. message on the net-zero transition.”
Late November or early December — Chester by-election
Labour whips are preparing to trigger a by-election in the city of Chester in late November or December.
The by-election is taking place because the city’s MP Christian Matheson resigned after a parliamentary watchdog recommended he be suspended for sexual misconduct.
Matheson sits on a 6,164-vote majority, and the seat has traditionally been a swing seat flipping between the Tories and Labour. It was Conservative up until 2010.
Based on current polling figures, Labour should win a significantly larger majority than it currently has, though by-elections do suffer from small turnouts and so unexpected results are not uncommon. A dramatic Tory defeat would set alarm bells ringing in the party.
Another by-election could be triggered in the coming months if, as expected, Boris Johnson elevates his ally and MP Nadine Dorries to the House of Lords in his resignation honors. That would likely be the first by-election in a Tory-held seat fought with Sunak as party leader.
December 31 — U.K. deadline for joining trans-Pacific trade bloc
The U.K. government has said it hopes to conclude negotiations on joining the CPTPP — a trade agreement signed by 11 countries including Australia and New Zealand — by the end of the year.
Securing this deal was one of Truss’ priorities. For Sunak it would represent both a concrete foreign policy achievement and an indication that the U.K. is successfully building closer diplomatic ties with countries in the Indo-Pacific after Brexit.
Talks around the partnership have thrown up some diplomatic obstacles, with China reacting angrily to U.K. trade officials meeting Taiwanese counterparts. Both China and Taiwan have applied to join the CPTPP.
There have been suggestions that the evidence against him is so damning that Johnson could face temporary suspension from parliament or even be kicked out as an MP. The inquiry may have formed part of Johnson’s decision not to stand for the Tory leadership contest.
If the privileges committee says Johnson should be sanctioned once it concludes its inquiry, Sunak will have to judge his response and decide whether to whip Tory MPs to back its recommendations even if that provokes Johnson’s ire. There is also the risk that Sunak himself will be dragged into the probe, given he too was fined over the Partygate scandal.
Among other things, the probe will examine the impact of the economic policies that Sunak designed as chancellor during the pandemic, putting his decisions under scrutiny.
His “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme — which encouraged people to dine in restaurants during the post-lockdown summer of 2020 — could become a focus, with critics claiming it drove up coronavirus-related infections and deaths.
February — Energy support nears its end
By the time Sunak’s first 100 days are up, there will be pressure on the government to explain how it will support people with their energy bills past the spring if wholesale gas prices haven’t drastically fallen. Hunt has already rolled back the Truss government’s two-year guarantee and instead capped people’s energy bills at an average of £2,500 for just six months. That policy ends in April.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Emmerson said: “We’ve got a big generous offer from the government through this winter — although prices are still a lot higher than they were last year, they will be nowhere near as high as they would have otherwise been.
“The prime minister and chancellor will spend a lot of time thinking about how they replace that scheme. In some ways, it’s very similar to the kind of furlough scheme that Sunak had during the pandemic — very generous, big scheme with lots of crude edges to it,” he said.
“It’s understandable wanting to get in place quickly to support people, but how do you get out of it? Do it too quickly and that’s too much pain for too many people — keep it in place for too long, and that’s very expensive to the government.”
It’s just one of so many enormous decisions the new PM faces in his first 100 days.
