 A very warm welcome wherever you're tuning in. I'm Chris Stark, the Chief Executive of the UK's Climate Change Committee. Thanks for joining us for the launch of our work on the Seventh Carbon Budget. So I want to start by taking you back to 2018. The committee was asked by the governments of the UK to provide advice on the implications of the 2015 Paris Agreement for the UK's climate targets. We undertook a major piece of analysis that led the committee to advise that it was time for the UK to set a new goal of net zero by 2050. That target was legislated in 2019. It remains the right ambition for the country, in line with the scientific imperative to halt global warming. But targets are one thing, achieving them is another. Great strides have been made in decarbonising the UK so far. We've nearly eliminated coal from our electricity generation. We've expanded renewable energy and we're now in the midst of the next major transition, the rollout of electrical transport. But in other areas, the transition to net zero has barely begun. The Climate Change Act is our guide to what must come next. It requires that we look beyond today and that we make preparations for the country to achieve sustained decarbonisation over the coming decades. The UK's carbon budgets guide that path. Carbon budgets very simply are the legal levels for UK emissions over a five-year period. Every five years, the Climate Change Committee considers the path ahead, what's feasible to cut emissions, the state of play on some of the key technologies, the cost-effective measures to achieve lasting reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And we provide our independent advice on the level of the next carbon budget. We've now reached the point when it's time for us to advise on the seventh carbon budget. That's the legal target for the period 2038 to 2042. We'll present that advice to government and to Parliament in early 2025. Since 2008, six carbon budgets have been approved by Parliament. Those budgets represent a practical pathway towards the UK's net zero target by 2050 at the latest. The early 2040s is the business end of the net zero transition. We'll be reaching full decarbonisation in many sectors, revealing the areas that are amongst the hardest to decarbonise. We'll also be coping with a warmer climate and the challenges that will bring. So our seventh carbon budget advice is some of the most substantial analysis we've ever undertaken and we take that responsibility very seriously indeed. Over the last 15 years, the Committee has learned a lot. We've learned lessons from policies that have been implemented and the response of the private sector and people living and working here in the UK. We've seen the global story change and crucial supply chains grow. We've seen UK emissions have since 1990. The next stage of the transition will take us into new areas with some fundamental implications for the way we work and live in the UK. The industries will grow in scale, the lifestyles we can sustain. Broadly, the path ahead requires four things. First is greater resource and energy efficiency. That's the bedrock of successful transition. It's often said the cheapest energy is the energy we don't use. That means better insulation in homes. It means technologies that consume energy more efficiently. It also means less waste and more careful use of our resources. It may also mean reducing our consumption of some high carbon products. That's changes to travel or diet, perhaps, often with wider positive benefits to health or household budgets. Second is the energy challenge, cleaning up the supply of electricity, growing new low carbon energy supplies in key areas like hydrogen. We still have a job to do here, so more wind farms, more nuclear, but also building an energy network to support it and create an energy system to store and supply energy reliably. Third is the challenge of replacing fossil fuel technologies with newer solutions that can use that clean energy. So this is the move to electric cars and vans. This is heat pumps, district heating, cleaner technologies for UK manufacturing. Think of this as the nation's big switchover. Ideally, replacing our fossil fuel technologies as they reach the end of their useful life, but perhaps scrapping some of those dirty technologies early. And finally, the fourth plank of the strategy is the net in net zero. For those areas where emissions remain agricultural radiation, for example, we need a counterbalance. We can look to nature here, planting more trees, restoring peatland, sustainably managing our land to remove CO2 and deliver environmental benefits. We can also use some of the biomass grown on UK land in engineered processes to capture and store CO2 or even move directly to capturing CO2 from the atmosphere with new technologies. A key conundrum is achieving all of this while maintaining and improving our food production system and making sure farming is a thriving profession into the future. These are now well accepted approaches to decarbonisation, but the plans to achieve this transition are going to take us into hugely exciting challenges where we're still learning the right approaches. How, for example, do we decarbonise home heating? How do we provide the right incentives to free up that land for climate services alongside conventional farming? What decarbonisation path will we take for shipping or aviation or freight? We are excited to illustrate these changes and the options for achieving them. Our plan is to provide detail for each sector of the economy and we'll try to show how these fit together in an integrated way to deliver new opportunities for the UK economy, scaling up infrastructure, growing new supply chains, but also confronting the real barriers to the transition and the need to scale back some high carbon sectors too. We'll look beyond the UK to international leaders on the rollout of electric vehicles or heat pumps, green industrial technology, and we'll ask some important questions about what we can expect from households and individuals in this transition and how to manage the costs and the benefits well. Now, I'd like to introduce Emily Nurse, our carbon budgets team leader. Emily will talk to you through our approach and how we consider the options available. So Emily, over to you. Thanks, Chris. As Chris mentioned, I lead the CCC's work on carbon budgets. I'll now talk you through our planned analytical approach for our Seventh Carbon Budget advice. For more details on this, please do read our document which can be found on our website. But first, let's picture where we hope to be when the Seventh Carbon Budget period begins, 14 years from now in 2038. If it all goes well and the UK has successfully achieved its currently legislated targets in the 2030s, we should have already seen significant progress. While we don't know exactly how things will be, we might expect a low carbon electricity supply system with a backbone from clean offshore wind, all new car and van cells to be fully electric with only around a fifth of cars on the road being powered by petrol or diesel, resulting in much less pollution in our cities. Around two thirds of the UK's homes heated by zero carbon technologies and they should be better insulated, our homes should be warmer and less damp. UK industries should be close to being completely decarbonised and we should have seen a shift to lower carbon diets and to lower carbon and more active modes of transport, providing benefits to people's health. So, we should have come a long way but there will still be plenty to do. As we approach net zero, the challenges we face will start to shift. Over the next year and a bit, here at the CCC we'll be working hard on updating our pathway to net zero, focusing on what will be needed during the Seventh Carbon Budget period to ensure we're on track. Our approach will be similar to that we used for our 2020 advice on the level of the Sixth Carbon Budget. Again, we'll develop a recommended, cost-affected pathway to net zero by 2050. This will be an update to our previous balance pathway. We also plan to develop a supplementary additional action pathway, one that explicitly lays out the additional actions that will be required should the UK choose to decarbonise faster. Like last time, we'll use a bottom-up approach, splitting the UK's greenhouse gas emissions into various sectors of the economy. Starting from the state of play today, we'll consider how emissions can be reduced in each of these sectors. Most options can be categorised into reductions in high carbon activities and adoption of low carbon technologies. Our pathways will consider both. When choosing between different low carbon technologies and deciding the rate at which they're rolled out, we consider a number of factors. Cost, compared to the higher carbon alternatives, is key. Both the cost in a given year and the overall cost of the transition. But there are other things that need to be considered too. There's a need for a skilled workforce and sufficiently developed supply chains and for low carbon infrastructure to be built. For example, we'll need to install a lot of electric heat pumps and we need skilled engineers to do this. There are practicalities around land and marine planning to consider, in particular when planning to expand our renewable electricity generation. There are constraints on finite resources, both at home and internationally. And we need to give consideration to feasible consumer behaviour and feasible private sector action. We know the world is warming, so when considering decarbonisation options, resilience to a changing climate is key. For example, there may be risks to infrastructure from droughts and from floods. And we need to consider imported emissions. These can arise from international supply chains, but they are not included in the UK's emissions reduction targets. It's important to ensure reductions in emissions at home are not achieved at the expense of increasing emissions abroad. This chart shows emissions in 2022 for each of the sectors of the UK economy. Currently, they're dominated by surface transport. That's mainly tailpipe emissions from cars and vans. Buildings, mostly from heating, are often poorly insulated homes and high carbon processes in UK industry. But by the end of the sixth carbon budget period in 2037, this picture should be very different. Emissions should be around a third of the levels today and sectors that are more difficult to decarbonise like agriculture and aviation will be starting to dominate, with a sizeable contribution remaining from buildings. Balancing emissions by the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via natural sinks, mostly trees, as well as engineered processes, will be becoming increasingly important. Building our evidence base on what is feasible for carbon dioxide removals in the UK will be an important part of our analysis. And this is even more the case by 2050 when we expect most sectors to have almost completely decarbonised. So, when determining the appropriate level of the seventh carbon budget, we need to focus on different things for the different sectors. For surface transport on industry, our focus is on the rate at which we decarbonise the remaining fifth of emissions and for buildings, the remaining almost half of emissions. As these sectors will need to almost completely decarbonise by 2050, the question is how much of this happens during the seventh carbon budget period. It will be important to consider the role of early scrappage of high carbon capital assets, such as fossil fuel cars and boilers. In the past, we've assumed that assets like cars and boilers will be replaced only when they reach the end of their natural lifetime. But this is not necessarily the most cost-effective nor the most desirable choice for consumers or businesses, especially as we reach the end of the transition. So, this time, we will give more focus to the role of scrappage, whilst being mindful of the emissions coming from the production of these assets. For aviation and agriculture, there is currently no credible way to reach zero emissions by 2050. There's a limit to what can be achieved via technological solutions, so a significant part of the story will be limiting the growth in aviation and shifting to lower carbon and healthier diets. We intend to increase our evidence base for what is feasible in these areas and for other reductions in demand for high carbon activity. This will be based on observed societal change elsewhere and historically, as well as behavioral and social science research and data on public attitudes. By 2050, we must be at net zero. So, as I mentioned before, residual emissions in these hard-to-decarbonised sectors will need to be balanced by the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There's a number of sources of uncertainty on the level of reported emissions in the 2040s. For example, from assumptions about the UK's population, economy and climate, and from assumed fuel and technology costs, and from future changes to emissions-reporting methodologies. We intend to quantify some key uncertainties to see their effect on emissions and the cost of the transition. There is also the possibility of further delays in action. We've seen this already in some key sectors. This chart shows our projections of industrial emissions from 2020 compared to actual reported emissions. As highlighted in our progress report to Parliament in June this year, these delays are putting current targets at risk. We intend to develop a framework to limit the risks to meeting legislated targets from both uncertainties and delays in action. This will involve contingency options, which can be drawn from our additional action pathway that I mentioned earlier. These options may include things such as earlier capital scrappage, more ambitious demand reductions requiring greater policy effort and more expensive technological ways of reducing emissions. Key to this will be determining the time required to implement the contingency options in a sensible and fair way. Past experience demonstrates that early decisive action is required and that delays and setbacks only make the journey to net zero harder. As well as an emissions pathway, we intend to calculate the whole economy costs and cost savings to the UK associated with the transition up to 2050. And complimenting this, we will consider key potential risks and opportunities for the UK economy as the world transitions to low carbon technologies. Understanding the distribution of the costs as well as the benefits to different types of households and to the exchequer will be an important consideration in our analysis. This is something that is significantly shaped by policy. So our analysis will consider policy packages consistent with our pathway and how they might redistribute the costs and cost savings across different households. Thanks very much for listening. I'll pass back to Chris now to talk about how you can get involved and to wrap things up. Thanks, Emily. Now, analysis alone isn't enough. We understand the interest there is in this work. So the committee is planning to undertake extensive engagement with industry, with business representatives, with local authorities, and of course with the public. For the sixth carbon budget, we received almost 200 responses to our call for evidence. We had round table discussions. We commissioned external research but we think we can go much wider this time. Our advice on the seventh carbon budget will be published in February 2025. Before then, we need your input and your engagement. We've already begun to commission some new external research. There is a lot more of that still to come. All of that will be published alongside our final output. It's very important to me and to the committee that we're transparent in this process and that anyone who's interested can read the evidence that we've used to shape this advice. We've published a document on our website that explains how we're approaching the analysis and a call for evidence. Have a look at that. I want to strongly encourage organisations and any representative bodies to submit evidence. It's going to help us shape this work. Most important of all, our committee and my team here at the CCC want to reach out to hear from as many people as possible. So we're invitations to meetings and events. You can send those to our office here and we aim to participate in as many of those events as we can. This year, we plan to prioritise engagement with groups that have had less representation to date in carbon budgets and we'll try to get to events across the United Kingdom. So thanks in advance for your support and for your engagement. Do get involved. This is exciting work.