Jersey way off carbon reduction target set seven years ago

Wednesday 10 November 2021

Wrong assumptions on population growth, limited funding and failed incentive schemes have all been to blame for Jersey failing to hit its own carbon emission targets.

As the Government plots a new course on decarbonisation - by aligning the Island with the 2015 Paris Agreement to reach set-zero emissions by 2050 - it has also reflected on why past strategies have failed.

Under its ‘Pathway 2050’ strategy of 2014, which aligned the island to the aims of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the Government set a target of an 80% reduction in emissions on 1990 levels by 2050.

However, despite Jersey making significant strides by importing low-carbon energy from France, produced by nuclear and hydroelectric generation, it has still failed to stick to the Pathway 2050 plan. 

In 2020, Jersey produced around 400,000 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide when, under the Pathway 2050, it should have produced 321,600 kilotonnes. 

Pictured: Jersey’s failure to stick to its population targets has contributed to its failure to hit its carbon-reducing targets too.

Indeed, Jersey’s actual emissions were closer to a level expected if no carbon-reducing interventions had been introduced. 

Launched by the late Environment Minister Rob Duhamel, ‘Pathway 2050; an Energy Plan for Jersey’, focused on reducing demand through a number of measures, including retro-fitting older properties with energy efficient materials, increasing numbers of ‘ultra-low emission vehicles’ and investigating the use of biofuels.

It was based on an annual net population increase of 350 people.

The Government says that not only is Jersey off-course on its Pathway 2050, but the trajectory proposed in 2014 is also no longer relevant, as the rate of global warming demands a more rapid rate of decarbonisation .

It says this is “sobering”, adding “the international scientific community has made it clear that an 80% reduction on 1990 levels is insufficient to prevent dangerous climate change hence the move under the Paris Agreement to ‘net-zero’ by 2050.

Identifying why Jersey failed to hit past targets, the Government said there were some “obvious explanations” why progress in recent years had not delivered the carbon reductions that were anticipated.

These included:

• Background population growth had been in excess of the modelled assumption.

• The funding behind Pathway 2050 was limited to £1m per annum and was substantially reduced in later budget rounds.

• The policies and action statements were not linked into long-term strategic planning, beyond the political cycle within which the energy plan was agreed.

• Policies did not always have the anticipated impacts. For example, an evaluation of the government’s retrofit scheme showed that, in practice, many residents took the thermal improvements as comfort - heating their homes more for the same cost - rather than as energy reductions.

• The pathway model (like all policy models) was illustrative and was based on assumptions and used a simple linear approach when, in practice, progress will always be uneven and should be observed over a long period to truly assess the trend.

The Government added that “some of these factors can be mitigated and potentially avoided in the design of the Carbon Neutral Roadmap”.

The first part of this - a ‘preferred strategy report’ - was published last week and the ‘roadmap’ itself, which will set out and cost specific policies - will be released before the end of the year.

The ‘preferred strategy report’ outlines a number of high-level policies, including aligning Jersey with the Paris Agreement and committing to local offsetting schemes, and lists which of the Citizens’ Assembly recommendations the Government has accepted.