 This is my final progress report as chairman of the Climate Change Committee. The Climate Change Act requires that every year, before the end of June, we assess the government's progress against the targets they have set. In it, we look back at the UK's warmest year on record. We all experience first hand what the warming world will be like with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees centigrade in the United Kingdom for the very first time. Last summer's heatwave caused unprecedented numbers of heat-related deaths, wildfires and significant disruption. And that was with a global temperature increase of 1.1 degrees. We are now on course for more than double that. It is quite likely that this year will again be warmer, and with every increment of global warming, the climate impacts and risks escalate. Storms, floods and heat waves become increasingly common and difficult to manage here in the UK. And last year there was a worse picture in the wider world. Much of Pakistan was under water. There were life-threatening floods in New Zealand, drought in Spain and unprecedented rainfall in Italy. Now Canada is being ravaged by wildfires. That's the reason we need to act with the utmost urgency. Now consistently, throughout my nearly 11 years as chairman, we have independently assessed the government's actions and never shied away from telling the unvarnished truth. Once more, my committee has a clear message for government. The failure to act decisively over the past year in response to the energy crisis means that the UK has lost the clear global leadership it once held. Things are changing rapidly elsewhere. There's the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, the Green Deal industrial plan in the European Union, and bold moves are being taken even in China. These major interventions, as a response at least in part to the fossil fuel price crisis, have changed the game on climate action, creating a global race to the top for industries of the future. The UK has failed to take comparable steps to reduce energy demand or to turbocharge renewable generation. The government's failure to act decisively has been further compounded by its support for the Cumbrian coal mine and the development of new North Sea oil fields. Support for the coal mine goes directly against our advice. We have also said there should be a presumption against new oil and gas fields beyond any necessary immediate response to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. That's different from starting new enterprise out in the North Sea. Our report highlights the effects of this failure. Our confidence in the United Kingdom achieving its 2030 target, which we praised for its ambition and upon which the UK's international reputation hangs, has materially reduced in this last year. Yet failure to meet this target would be a failure against the very commitments the United Kingdom set for itself nationally and internationally. But there is still time to correct the failures of the past year. The government must now act decisively and with ambition. It cannot wait till the next election. My colleagues, Christach and Emily Nurse, will talk about the rate of emissions reductions required to meet our international obligations. But there are some areas which I want to highlight as priorities. Firstly, the government must ensure that decisions on UK fossil fuel production and infrastructure are consistent with net zero and the United Kingdom's expectations of other nations. Recent decisions have undermined this principle. Then the land use and agricultural sectors in England remain without a clear strategy and policies which are necessary to meet the multiple needs for the land. A joined up approach is necessary and very long overdue along with an urgent improvement in the rate of tree planting and peatland restoration. Thirdly, the government can no longer dodge the question on the future of heating our homes. It needs to overcome the uncertainty being caused by not taking a decision on the role of hydrogen in heating until 2026. The government must accelerate deployment of electric heating and press ahead with the infrastructure decisions that we have called no and low regrets. Next, the planning system must not prevent the rollout of infrastructure needed to deliver net zero. And it must ensure that all planning decisions give full regard to the imperative of net zero to which the government has committed itself. For too long, we have been building homes and infrastructure that will need to be retrofitted. And lastly, we must ensure that action to reduce emissions is accompanied by action to adapt to climate change so we can reduce climate risks and our vulnerability. So my outgoing message to the Prime Minister is this. Fighting climate change, confronting the cost of living crisis and establishing Britain's economic future all demand the same decisive actions. There is still time to avoid being left behind in the race to gain the advantages of a net zero world. Only ambition, action and delivery can ensure the United Kingdom re-establishes its clear global climate leadership and makes the most of all the opportunities offered by a greener, cleaner, more prosperous, kinder world. This is the Climate Change Committee's 15th Annual Progress Report. That's a record of annual climate scrutiny that you won't find in many other countries. Each year, since the Climate Change Act became law in 2008, we've assessed the UK's progress towards the legal emissions target through changes of government and moments of crisis for the country. Over time, we've moved increasingly towards detailed indicators of the changes that we need to see on the ground, changes that we expect to see in each sector within pathways that we've developed here at the CCC. This year, we've gone even further with our monitoring maps. They're packed with real-world metrics of delivery. But that process of becoming more and more detailed in our assessment can sometimes hide the bigger trends, and that's what I want to start today. Three important things have become clear over the last year. First, the post-pandemic position appears to be settling into a lower emissions state. There was a small increase in UK emissions between 2021 and 2022, but they were still below pre-pandemic levels. Second, fundamental changes are happening around the world on decarbonisation. In a year of political turmoil in the UK, these haven't received the coverage they deserve. Europe has responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and worked hard to cut its reliance on Russian oil and gas. The outlook for EU emissions reduction looks better in the long run. The US has introduced an Inflation Reduction Act with much bigger incentives for low-carbon investments, and China has also upped the pace of renewable deployment. And third, closer to home, we've seen the influence of the courts on the UK policy programme for net zero. Following a high court judgement last July, UK ministers have been required to produce a more detailed plan for emissions reduction. This is the new context. It can and it should support faster progress on emissions. Sadly, our assessment doesn't show that kind of change, and we're increasingly worried. This year, we've chewed through an unprecedented amount of material from government. In March, we received from the government the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan, which responded to the High Court's request for greater transparency on policy impacts. We welcome this. Emily will shortly talk us through what this new detail tells us in each area. The headline is that our confidence in hitting the present carbon budget over the next four years has increased slightly. That's good news, driven particularly by what appears to be a post-pandemic decrease in vehicle kilometres driven. But look out to 2030 and beyond to the sixth carbon budget, and things look worse. Despite over 3,000 pages of new detail from government, we appear to have gone backwards. What's going on? Stripping out aviation and shipping where the pandemic is still having an effect. Let's stand in 2022 and look back eight years, and then forward eight years to the UK's 2030 target. The annual rate of emissions reductions over the past eight years was 2.9% a year. In the next eight years, the rate of emissions reductions needs to almost double. That's a huge leap which policy has to drive. Now let's go further. A huge amount of attention in the last year has been lavished on energy supply quite understandably. Government has been willing to up the ambition on renewables and nuclear as part of an energy security strategy. But the biggest decarbonisation challenges now lie outside of the electricity sector. So what's happening there? If we exclude the power sector, emissions have only fallen by an average of 1% in the last eight years. The rate of progress will need to almost quadruple if the UK is to meet its international commitment in the 2030 target. That's a massive effort, and we just haven't seen evidence of a change of that magnitude in the 3,000 pages of material supplied. In fact, our confidence in meeting the 2030 target and the sixth carbon budget has actually decreased in the last 12 months. We need to get real on net zero, and that means looking wider than just the energy story. Looking at the same story by sector this time, you can see the challenge even more clearly. The yellow bars here show progress in the last eight years. The blue lines show required progress in the next eight years. Only in the power sector is the story one of a lower rate of decarbonisation. That's because we've largely closed the coal-fired power stations now. In every other sector, the pace of change must increase and urgently. We need to move from policy proposals into harder-edge delivery. We need to scale up real world deployment, encourage private investment, push incentives towards lower carbon consumer choices, support new supply chains. In agriculture, land use and waste, there's been no recent progress at all. Tree planting rates have been too low for too long. Peatland restoration rates are a factor of five less than our recommended rates. We need to approximately double recent rates of decarbonisation in industry, especially with a stronger plan to electrify British industry. We need a quadrupling of pace in surface transport emissions, committing fully to the zero-emission vehicle story. A doubling of progress in buildings is required with a supply chain challenge looms large. Current rates of heat pump installation are just a ninth of where they need to be. Even for the electricity system, we've highlighted the need for a full strategy for delivering a decarbonised, reliable, resilient electricity system by 2035. No doubt there are glimmers of the net zero transition now playing out around us. Our concern is inertia in making the change happen. Given all this, you may be surprised to hear that I think it can be addressed. Key is not slipping on the UK's existing commitments, recommitting to existing goals, the 2030 fossil fuel vehicle phase out, the 2035 target of zero carbon electricity, 600,000 heat pumps by 2028. I would love to see stronger commitment from ministers to these commitments, giving greater confidence to a shaky market. There's an astonishing amount of effort now taking place across government, but it's happening in a recent period of unhelpful uncertainty. There's been a distinct cooling in the political support for net zero. PACE must be prioritised as much for the good of the UK economy and the race to net zero as for the climate itself. The key planks of the UK net zero strategy are the right ones, but this is an infrastructure led strategy and much of that infrastructure has substantial leap times. It's not quick to build the required electricity grid, low carbon hydrogen production and storage, carbon capture and storage. The planning system is holding much of this up, as is the failure to commit more fully to improving the incentives for consumers and people in this country to move to low carbon. Key in this is the plan rebalancing of electricity and gas bills. Quite properly the focus in the last year has been on energy bills. As we look to the future, the single most important move is to improve the incentives for consumers and businesses to use low carbon electricity in preference to fossil fuels. That will drive the transition to heat pumps and electric vehicles more quickly than any other single policy. Government has the tools. This is a critical period to use them. Over to Emily now to take us into the report in more detail. Chris has clearly set out the scale of the challenge the UK is now facing. As he explained, the rate of emissions reduction in sectors outside electricity supply needs to almost quadruple for the UK to meet its international commitment in 2030. That's only seven years away. I'm now going to talk you through more of the detail from the key findings of our annual progress report. Let's start by looking at how the UK's greenhouse gas emissions changed last year. From 2021 to 2022, emissions increased slightly, less than 1% overall, mainly coming from a balance of two effects. Firstly, aviation emissions almost doubled as people started flying again following the pandemic, but this was balanced by a 16% decrease in emissions from people's homes. A lot of this decrease was due to the mild winter months in 2022 compared to the colder weather in 2021. If we make an adjustment to the emissions change to take out the effect from the temperature differences, we still see a 6% decrease in emissions from homes, most likely coming from record high gas prices encouraging people to use less energy. We don't know, though, whether this was due to more efficient use of energy which would be a positive step forward, especially if maintained, or because people were not able to keep their homes comfortably warm, which is obviously not what we want. In any case, emissions changes were driven by mostly temporary shifts and not significant policy progress with the combination of changes in emissions from all other sectors very small. Let's zoom out now and look at how things have been progressing over the longer term. Emissions are now nearly half what they were more than three decades ago in 1990, driven mostly by the phase out of coal generation of electricity, so the UK is almost halfway on its journey to net zero by 2050. So far, all the UK's targets have been achieved. The black dots which show historical emissions as yearly averages over each carbon budget period are below the blocks which shows the level of each legislated carbon budget in blue with a little extra in grey to allow for emissions from international aviation and shipping. This is a success. But as Chris has shown, things are now getting a lot harder with the targets from 2030 onwards particularly challenging. These are the UK's international commitment to reduce emissions by 68% compared to 1990 levels by 2030, shown as the red bar, and the sixth carbon budget, which is the last block on the chart, covering 2033 to 2037. The important question is, how is the government doing with progress towards these future targets? This is what our progress report focuses on. In March this year, the government published a suite of documents released on what they called energy security day. To be honest, we were expecting more to be announced on this day, in particular a stronger response to progress being seen internationally like in the US and the EU. Something useful the government did publish that day was its carbon budget delivery plan. This document contains a really detailed breakdown of the emissions reductions expected from most, but not all of its various decarbonisation policies. This was in response to a high court ruling last summer that the government's 2021 net zero strategy was unlawful because it didn't contain this level of detail and so didn't comply with the Climate Change Act. The carbon budget delivery plan was a welcome step up in transparency from government. There's been a change in projected emissions in some sectors when comparing quantified policies in the carbon budget delivery plan from this year with the government's own net zero strategy from 2021. This chart compares projected emissions in each sector between the two over the sixth carbon budget period. The most notable change is a significant increase in projected emissions from surface transport. This is due to a couple of things. The first is that recent evidence leads to an increase in the estimate of emissions from plug-in hybrid vehicles, making them even less desirable than fully electric vehicles than previously thought. One of our recommendations to government is to include these hybrid vehicles in the 2030 bound of fossil fuel cars and vans, which would obviously help. The second reason is a choice that government has made not to estimate the majority of emissions savings that could be possible by reducing traffic. Reducing traffic is really important, not just due to the cost-effective emissions savings it would achieve, but also to provide cleaner air and less congestion for people in the UK. It's important that the government commit to this and indicate the expected emissions reduction it could achieve. I'm now going to talk through our assessment of whether the government's plans are sufficient for meeting these future targets. This chart shows average annual emissions over the three future carbon budget five-year periods, covering this year, 2023, up to 2037. The purple lines show what is required to meet the future targets. The black dots show the government's projected emissions from the quantified policies and proposals in the carbon budget delivery plan. For the fourth carbon budget, the one on the left, the projection overshoots what is needed to meet the target. This is appropriate as the target level was set before the UK was committed to reaching net zero, so things do need to go faster. For the UK's 2030 international commitment, shown in the middle and the sixth carbon budget shown on the right, the projections very nearly reached the targets and the government expects the remaining shortfall to be made up by a set of unquantified policies and proposals in their plan. The grey dots show the projection of expected emissions in the absence of decarbonisation policies, which we call the baseline. You can see the gap between the targets and the baseline increases in time. This is the required emissions reduction and the colour-coded blocks signify our assessment of what government has proposed to achieve these. Green, if credible policies are in place. Yellow, if there are some risks to delivery. Orange, if the risks are significant. And red, if plans are completely insufficient or just missing. For the fourth carbon budget, our confidence has grown slightly since last year, coming mainly from increased confidence in reducing emissions from cars over this period. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, road traffic is less now than it was before the pandemic by about 5%, but I should note that if the government are not willing to develop sufficient policies to empower people to make low-carbon travel choices, then this progress could well be lost. The second thing is that sales of electric vehicles have continued to grow this year, faster even than our own pathway, giving us more confidence in this part of the transition, at least in the short term. That's the good news story. Looking now at the targets in the 2030s, things are not so positive. Our confidence in the government's plans for these targets has decreased. Let's look at our assessment from last year, and now back to our assessment this year. We now see less green and more red, which isn't the direction we want to be going. So where is this coming from? This next chart is similar to the last, but focusing on what is needed for the UK's 2030 target and breaking it down by the highest emitting sectors of the economy, such as surface transport and buildings. As before, the black dots show projected emissions in each sector under the government's quantified decarbonisation policies and proposals. The grey dots show projected emissions in the absence of those policies and proposals, and the coloured blocks are assessment of these policies and proposals, this time shown by sector. Comparing our assessment this year with last years, you can see our confidence has reduced in a number of places. This is coming partly from continued delays in action, leading to increased delivery risk, and partly from the increased detail on budget delivery plan, allowing for a more thorough assessment over different time periods. The zero emissions vehicle mandate is delayed, so we have less green for surface transport over this period. Same for electricity supply, where there is still no overarching strategy for decarbonisation by 2035, and there is increasing delivery risks around planning and network connections. There's significantly more red in industry. We're quite worried now about the lack of policies to drive industrial electrification, especially as it has become clear that decarbonisation of the steel industry is relying on this. There is more red now for the negative emissions expected from engineered removals. Continued delays to funding and guidance means there may now be insufficient time for new projects to begin operating by 2030. Agriculture and land are missing an overall strategy, and it's becoming clear how dependent things are on the take up of voluntary measures with a lack of long term funding in the sector. Our assessment for buildings is similar to last year. There is still significant risk in the market-based mechanism for heat pump installations and policy gaps remain for energy efficiency measures, despite a clear incentive to ramp up the pace following the record high gas prices we've seen in the last year. Overall, there are too many areas of concern. When making these assessments, we take into account what is actually happening on the ground here in the UK. Earlier I showed you a chart of electric car sales and how they compare with projections. This is just one of many quantitative indicators that we track following a revamp of how we monitor progress that we introduced last year. All the details are in our monitoring framework on our web page. The framework explains how we've developed monitoring maps for all sectors of the economy. Each one identifies the early indicators of change that need to be tracked. They map out the interdependencies between contextual factors such as societal shifts and international developments, the policies and the enablers that are needed to reach required outcomes. Enablers include things such as public engagement, governance and business action. The outcomes that need to be achieved in each sector sit on the top of the maps, and we have a large collection of indicators for these as well as for many of the enabling factors. The key indicators are shown here. We've assessed each of these to determine if they are on track, the green ones. Off track, either slightly, the orange ones, or significantly, the red ones. For some of them, shown in grey, there's either insufficient data or it's too early to tell how things are going. While there are some areas where things are on track, there are far too many that are off track and this urgently needs to change. I already showed the positive story from the continued growth in electric car sales and how this has increased our confidence in this sector. Less positive is the sales of electric vans. These haven't yet picked up in the same way which is concerning as van traffic is also increasing fast. The electricity supply sector has so far been the UK's success story with the phase out of coal being the main driver reducing emissions so far. Now deployment of renewable generation needs to accelerate. While wind generation capacity continues to grow, the government's own targets are extremely ambitious and deployment rates will need to increase. Solar generation capacity has not been growing fast enough and needs to ramp up. By carbonising the UK's leaky homes, energy efficiency measures in buildings need to increase substantially as do heat pump installations to make sure the UK meets its target of 600,000 per year by 2028 a factor of 9 more than was seen last year. Unfortunately both are significantly off track with energy efficiency measures having a bad historical record due to a number of policy failures. This is also one of the policy gaps I discussed earlier. We've already talked about the agriculture sector being off track in general and this is clear when we look at the rate of tree planting in the last decade and see how fast this has to ramp up in the next few years. Livestock numbers are currently decreasing and on track but there are no policies to support this going forwards and government has no targets here and won't engage in an open discussion about a shift towards healthier and more sustainable diets. Unfortunately there are still a number of places where things are not on track One of our priority recommendations is that government should develop a set of contingency plans over the next year. These should be alternative policy options that would further reduce emissions and mitigate these delivery risks. This chart focuses on the UK's international target in 2030 shown as a dashed red line. The grey dot shows projected emissions in the absence of decarbonisation policies. As I've already shown there is a significant chunk of the required emissions reduction in the coefficient plans the red bit shown here or carry significant risk, the orange bit. As well as a shortfall that government expects to make up with the unquantified policies and proposals that's the gap between the bottom of the red and the dashed line. We've identified a number of areas where the government could go further to mitigate these risks. One is in tackling traffic levels some minimal policies in this area are included in the government's plan to make it more here by strengthening these policies and providing an estimate of possible emissions savings. Going further than the government's own plans we have looked at some options that we recommend be included straight away. These are phasing out the sale of new plug-in hybrids by 2030 empowering the public to make low-carbon choices in what they eat and introducing policies to limit the growth in flying, for example by addressing private flights and providing lower cost services, you can see the gap up to the top of the red block starting to close. Going beyond this we've identified additional options going even further in diet change and limiting the growth of flying and going faster than both the government's plans and our recommendations to decarbonise buildings. In this last category we recommend that government first track progress by using the many indicators we have identified and if things are going off track implement these additional options. This needs to be carefully planned as alternatives can be implemented with sufficient time. Rather than slamming on emergency breaks because it has got too late to do things in a sensible and fair way. With the UK's 2030 target only seven years away action is needed now to develop these contingency plans. Thanks for listening I hope you found this helpful and I'll pass back to Chris now to talk through some of the other priority recommendations to explain how to navigate our report and to wrap things up. Thanks so much Emily. So this is a very important moment to increase the pace of delivery. We have 27 priority recommendations for government and a total of 300 recommendations in our report. Among them empower people to make green choices by communicating the most impactful ways to reduce emissions. Survey evidence shows that people often take some of the least effect of actions today. Rebalance the cost of electricity and gas to help make lower carbon technologies the cheaper option. Provide clear guidance to businesses to ensure offsets are not being used in place of real decarbonisation. Narrow the scope of one of the most challenging decisions before government a strategic decision on low carbon heat in buildings. Address the risks and the policy gaps that Emily and I have highlighted today fill in the gaps and strategy for a decarbonised electricity system and for land use particularly and focus on removing barriers to more rapid progress. We know where they are, particularly in the planning system. To really get into the details, please go and read the report yourself. It's packed full of insightful analysis from the team. We have a 20 page executive summary and each chapter in the report can be read alone. If you're particularly interested in, for example, buildings decarbonisation just jump straight to chapter 5 if you want to read about the enablers of the transition, public engagement, business jobs, fairness, head to chapter 15. Our 300 recommendations to government can also be filtered and searched on our web page and we've created a snapshot summary of our key messages which you'll also find on the web page. For now, thank you for tuning in. We hope to bring you more insights over the year and of course we hope we'll be able to reflect on faster progress in next year's progress report. Over to you, Government.