Britain’s latest climate action plan is unlawful, a high court judge has ruled, after a legal challenge by three environmental campaign groups over emissions targets.
The environmental charities Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth, and the Good Law Project took joint legal action against the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) over its decision to approve the carbon budget delivery plan (CBDP) in March 2023.
The plan outlines how the country will achieve targets set out in the sixth carbon budget, which runs until 2037, as part of wider efforts to reach net zero by 2050.
Those emissions targets were set after a 2022 ruling that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris agreement goal of containing temperatures within 1.5C (2.7F) of pre-industrial levels.
The three groups argued at a hearing in February that the then secretary of state, Grant Shapps, acted unlawfully by approving the plan as he lacked information on whether individual policies could be delivered in full.
Friends of the Earth’s lawyer, David Wolfe, said Britain’s Climate Change Committee warned last year there were credible policies in place for less than 20% of the reductions required to meet the carbon budget for the period 2033-37. But, the group said, Shapps “proceeded on the assumption that the reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases from all of the proposals and policies ... would all be delivered in full”.
In a ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four of the five grounds of the legal challenge, stating that Shapps’s decision was “simply not justified by the evidence”.
He said: “If, as I have found, the secretary of state did make his decision on the assumption that each of the proposals and policies would be delivered in full, then the secretary of state’s decision was taken on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position.”
A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets. The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”
More details soon …