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A key document that will influence the choices that islanders and the Government make for the next three decades is due to be realised this week.
Although the Government Plan, which covers public finances for the next four years, will dominate the headlines this week, arguably the publication of the Carbon Neutral Roadmap on Friday will have a more significant and lasting impact.
The document – which will be followed by three months of consultation – sets out the decisions that each Government will have to take between now and 2050 to reduce the island’s carbon emissions to net zero, meaning that for any carbon that is produced, the same amount is removed from the atmosphere.
2050 was the net-zero emissions target agreed in Paris in 2015 which Jersey recently signed up to at COP26 in Glasgow.
The ‘roadmap’ also proposes firm policies that will have a direct bearing on islanders, introducing levies to influence behaviour but also spending £23m already in a ‘Climate Emergency Fund’ to ensure that less-well-off people aren’t disproportionately disadvantaged by carbon-cutting measures.
Although specific measures have not been released before publication of the roadmap, the Government has said that additional charges for public and private carparks, a ‘modest’ tourist tax, new road-user charges and a solid waste levy are likely to be proposed.
Pictured: How Jersey's decarbonisation journey compares with other jurisdictions.
A carbon tax, however, has been ruled out.
During a recent grilling by Scrutineers, the Government’s Head of Sustainability and Foresight, Dr Louise Magris, said: “The Roadmap will give the whole community the chance to have a view, as well as States Members, on the package of policies that everyone has been waiting for, to help islanders transition.
“It is individual action that will help us reach these Paris targets. They are ambitious and difficult, and it will be down to individual behaviours: how do we travel and how do we heat our homes and places of work?
“That is what this comes down to.”
“You will recognise in the policies the direct ways that they hope to intervene, using money currently available to help people decarbonise their lifestyles.
“Some policies will apply to individuals and some to businesses, so, as a community, the package of measures will be about enabling people to decarbonise behaviours.
“Everyone on the Paris journey has that same level of ambition, if we are to prevent catastrophic climate changes, as the scientists tell us.”
Pictured: The Government's Head of Sustainability and Foresight, Dr Louise Magris.
This week’s ‘roadmap’ comes out of a ‘Preferred Strategy’ document, which the Government published last month, which set out why the island should align itself to the Paris Agreement, which to reduce carbon emissions by 68% of 1990 levels by 2030, by 78% by 2035 and 100% by 2050.
Jersey has currently reduced its emissions by 36% since 1990, so must decarbonise by another third by 2030 and the final third by 2050.
States Members did agree in 2019 to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 but the Government says this would involve buying offsets from 2030.
It argues that future governments could still commit to meet the 2030 deadline, if the offset market matures into a more reliable form.
However, it adds that the Citizens’ Assembly which help define the Preferred Strategy, and States Members, have previously expressed doubts about offsetting, concluding it would better to spend money on local carbon-reducing measures, such as planting seagrass forests, rather than send money elsewhere.
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