n. First of all, I want to start with what is it that my organisation, the Committee on Climate Change, is required to do under the Climate Change Act? Then I will move on and talk about some of the things we have actually done in the three years that we have existed. The ambition we have recommended for the UK Government, Parliament and the Parliament, and some of the stuff we have had to say on sexual emissions reductions. First of all, what do we have to do as the Committee on Climate Change? I should say we were established in December 2008 when the Climate Change Act became legislation in the UK. We actually existed for about a year before that in shadow form so that we could develop our advice on things like the 2050 target. You can see on the left-hand side of that slide there we are supposed to recommend ambition on the 2050 target. We did that back in 2008. We talked about whether it should be 60% or 80% or more and I've got a couple of slides on that in a minute. We also have to advise on something called carbon budgets so that's five year ceilings on emissions in the UK and in the first instance we talked about the three carbon budgets going out to 2022. We've recently advised the Government on something called the fourth carbon budget, which covers a period 23 to 27. Again, I've got a few slides on the fourth carbon budget, which was very high profile in the UK. It was a very tense debate that we had there across the Government and the various other stakeholders to get that fourth carbon budget into legislation. We're not just asked about the ambition for carbon budgets, but we have to advise on within that what is the appropriate balance of domestic emissions reductions versus the purchase of emissions reductions in other countries through the carbon market and then doing that we have to take a view on what are the sexual opportunities for emissions reductions here in the UK. We are asked and we have to do this next year to advise whether aviation and shipping should be included in carbon budgets. That's a key issue. In the case of the UK it was fudged a little bit so when we had the Climate Change Act first in legislation this was kicked into the long grass although we do have to revisit the issue next year so a big decision to make there. In the case of Scotland in contrast, which has a climate change act, they decided from the beginning to include aviation and shipping in their framework and in their carbon targets. Then there's a very live issue, should carbon budgets and carbon targets be about CO2 or should it be all greenhouse gases? We were asked to advise on that and we advise that it should be all greenhouse gases and so the 80% target which we recommend it is for all greenhouse gases not just CO2. It's a set of things we have to think about in advising the Government and in advising Parliament and you can see those on the right hand side there. Competitiveness is a key issue for the energy intensive industries and one that we are heavily scrutinised by those industries when we make our recommendations. Security of supply, obviously very important. Fuel poverty, well energy bills, rising energy prices are a key political issue in the UK at the moment and I think probably they are here in Ireland as well. The Treasury is very interested in what is the impact of carbon budgets on our fiscal position so we have to look in detail at all of these aspects in the context of our advice. Second thing we do is well it's no good just setting ambitious targets and then walking away and forgetting about these. I think if we were to do that well nothing much would happen and over time we'd see that we were off track and we wouldn't meet our carbon budgets so a very important part of our job is to look at progress reducing emissions which we do on an annual basis and we provide an annual report to Parliament which not only says have we reduced emissions are we within the limits retrospectively we also take a forward look and say well are we on track to cut emissions in the future given that we have a strong sense of what we need to do in the future while there's implications for now are we doing those things we need to do and then there's a set of things we do specific pieces of advice which the Government requests from us so for example we've done a review of aviation emissions we've done a review of renewable energy we've done a review of the cap and trade scheme called the carbon reduction commitment for the non-energy intensive sectors and we've done a low carbon innovation review so that's us that's what we do under the climate change act with that introduction what I want to talk about is first of all our 2050 target then I quickly want to move on to a 2030 target and the fourth carbon budget and then I want to talk about budget costs and policy implications I want to finish off with well how are we actually doing in the UK not just on grandstanding and making very ambitious commitments but also getting our emissions down so 2050 target that the starting point for all of our advice both on the longer term target and the carbon budgets has to be the climate change science and so that's written in the climate change act and I was given a copy of the Daily Mail coming on to the the aeroplane to get over this morning and in the Daily Mail it said well you know the science now tells us that the world is going to get colder not warmer and they're picking up a piece of evidence that was produced by University of Reading recently and totally misrepresenting it but in our advice on the fourth carbon budget we did go back and look at the science we reviewed not just the 200 years of science evidence that we have but the most recently peer reviewed 500 articles that they've been in the last couple of years and that review said well the global climate change is already happening but we can measure that it's very hard to dispute that there's a high degree of confidence that it's largely not all but largely due to human activity so the burning of fossil fuels they're putting into the atmosphere of something we know traps heat in the atmosphere then without action so on a business as usual path there would be some very bad consequences for both human welfare and ecosystems but I think the main message there is that we still have the opportunity to reduce emissions and mitigate these risks of dangerous climate change so that was in the fourth carbon budget this just goes back to the thought process we went through to get to the 80% target so this is the IPCC's assessment of the kind of risks we face in a world of dangerous climate change and I'm not going to dwell on that because I think you're probably all familiar with it but certainly not a very good picture I think it's dangerous in this space to be apocalyptic and to focus on these things but I think as a departure point we can start there and then move quickly on to well what can we do to avoid being in a world of flooding and disease and starvation and those very negative outcomes for people so what we did in coming up with the 80% target is we said well what is an appropriate objective from a climate perspective and for us an objective was we should keep central estimates of global mean temperature change as close as we can to two degrees but we should also keep the probabilities of dangerous temperature change and we say there dangerous temperature changes above four degrees or we should keep those scenarios to very low levels and against that objective we ran various global emissions scenarios and the ones that meet that objective have global emissions peaking in 2020 and then very deep cuts thereafter such that we get to a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050 now then you ask well what does a 50% global emissions reduction mean for the UK or for developed countries like the UK Highland for example our argumentation was well if global emissions are about 20 to 24 gigatons in 2050 works out about two tons per capita then we used Nick Stearns argument it's very hard to see a global agreement which allows the UK to emit more than the global average in 2050 and on that basis well two tons per capita translates into an 80% emissions reduction so that's where the 80% target comes from and this is what the 80% target means and you can see there on the left hand side UK emissions are 670 million tons or thereabouts at the moment and we need to get those down to 160 million tons and there's a couple of things to say about this picture clearly it's a massive challenge to go from 670 down to 160 now one of the things that we have been pretty strong on is whilst we come by offset credits in the global carbon market at the moment they are abundant they're cheap you can't plan that that will be the case in the future so as you get to 2050 as all countries are trying to get their emissions down well it's hard to see who will be selling those credits and certainly you can't plan for them being cheap in 2050 so for us we need to plan to get to that 160 million tons largely through domestic emissions reductions and the second thing is if you look at those sectors on the left hand side well international aviation very hard to see how we can get aviation emissions down by 80% I think the same is true of agriculture where there's limited opportunities for abatement industry at the moment we haven't got a strong story for how you could get those emissions down and the implication is well if you've got those hard to treat sectors well you need to get emissions in the other sectors where we do have the abatement options you need to get those emissions further than 80% and close to zero carbon and power heat and surface transport are the obvious examples there so we need to actually go further than 80% in those key emitting sectors now 2050 is a long way away and certainly for me I thought well the 2050 target isn't that interesting but I think it is interesting having worked on it now for a number of years it's interesting in so far as it has implications for the medium term and that the medium term has implications for the nearer term approaches that we need to put in place at the moment to be on track to that longer term objective so I'm going to move on to talking about the 2030 target and the fourth carbon budget now if you've got to get an 80% emissions reduction in 2050 and if you've got to go further in some of the key sectors like power like buildings like surface transport well there is an implication that you need to be doing something in 2030 it's not the case that you can plausibly say we're going to go right through to the mid 2040s and do nothing and suddenly fall off a cliff with emissions in all of these sectors so given capital stock turnover given availability of technologies there is an implication of 2050 for 2030 and then there's another way of thinking about things which is well there is a set of abatement opportunities we have those have costs associated there is a carbon price in the global market you can compare those costs and those carbon prices and say well it makes sense to do something if it costs less than the carbon price and then the science tells you as well it's not just about a point estimate of emissions in 2050 it's the area under the curve it's the cumulative emissions both here but globally to 2050 that will determine the extent of climate change so we have to get our emissions down in 2030 in the period to 2030 so that the cumulative emissions are within the limits that keep the risks of dangerous climate change down now we adopted all of those three ways of looking at the problem to come up with a 2030 recommendation and they all bring you out actually in a similar place which is by 2030 we should be aiming to reduce emissions by about 60% on 1990 levels and you can see there the third bar for 2030 it tells you where those emissions reductions come from and most of them come from those sectors where we've got a strong sense of what the options are so the power sector heat in buildings and surface transport and let me just take you through very quickly there what the story is so in the power sector what we envisage is that over the next decade there'll be a reduction in emissions sorry if we look at the top left hand picture what we envisage is that there'll be a reduction in demand over the next decade through energy efficiency improvements so more efficient lighting and appliances but after that there'll be very significant growth and that growth comes from the development of new markets for electricity and those markets are namely electric vehicles so electric cars and electric vans but also electric forms of heating and in particular air source and ground source heat pumps at the same time we've got an opportunity to drastically cut the carbon intensity of power generation so we can get that down we think through a combination of nuclear renewables and carbon capture and storage we can get our carbon intensity down from about 500 grams of co2 per kilowatt hour at the moment in the UK down to about 50 grams over the next two decades and the combination of those two things is that there's a great opportunity to get emissions right down in the power sector if we move on to cars again there's a similar story we don't think that in tackling climate change and reducing emissions that people have to become less mobile and so you can see in the top left hand picture there that we envisage demand for car travel going up over the next two decades but at the same time there's a big opportunity to get the carbon intensity of car travel down and the combination of those two things is that car emissions whilst they have gone up in the last years can be very significantly cut over the next two decades and just a sense of how we might achieve that this is a snapshot of 2030 it's not a blueprint of exactly where we should be but order of magnitude it tells you by 2030 most people in a carbon constrained world should be buying not just an efficient conventional vehicle but ultra low carbon vehicle whether it's plug-in hybrids or whether it's pure battery electric vehicles possibly it might be hydrogen fuel cell vehicles but by that time most people should be buying that kind of vehicle in order to be where we need to be in terms of cutting our emissions and meeting carbon budgets this picture bit harder than the other two slides to tell what's going on there but what you can see is that in the residential sector we see a lot of scope for energy efficiency improvement over the next decade similarly in the non-residential sector so that brings energy demand down and then we see beyond that initial phase of energy efficiency improvement that people start to switch from conventional gas boilers in the UK to the use of electric heat pumps and the combination of those things is that we can get our emissions in buildings again right down over the next two decades so that's a a sectoral story about how you can meet that 2030 notional target which we've recommended to the government and what i should say is the first reaction of people when we recommended this to government the first reaction was 60% in 2030 on the path to 80% in 2050 sounds very front loaded but actually if you look at the numbers it's back loaded that 60% emissions reduction given where we are now so we've cut emissions since 1990 it requires a 3% or slightly higher emissions reduction over the next two decades and then moving to something close to a 5% annual average emissions reduction after that so for us well this is back-ended that level that degree of back-ending is okay given the technologies that we think will have available post 2030 but any further back-ending certainly puts you on a very high cost path to meeting the 2050 target and starts to raise questions about the credibility can you actually meet that 2050 target you're leaving too much to do there now the 2030 target was a framing device for what's gone into the legislation it's gone into the legislation last week it was approved both in the house of commons and the house of lords and that's the fourth carbon budget so you can see on the right hand side there the number in the legislation is 1950 megatons and what you can see to the left of that are the carbon budgets the first three carbon budgets in legislation so at the moment those orange budgets are legislated obviously there is a very significant cut to get to that fourth carbon budget from where we are at the moment from the first carbon budget now the key debates in getting this fourth carbon budget agreed i don't know how much coverage it got over here but there was a certainly a bit of a divide in the cabinet and so there was a very strong support for the fourth carbon budget initially from the department of energy from the department of environment and from the foreign office but there was a bit of caution on the side of the department for business the treasury and the department for transport and the debates were all about well what is the impact on the macroeconomic situation that comes down to how much does it cost and what are the spending implications as well for now when the UK government is committed to bringing down its spending and so in terms of how much does it cost to be on this medium term emissions paths are getting a 60% cut in 2030 relative to 1990 well our estimate is it costs about 1% of GDP and just to understand what that means it means that you sacrifice a fraction of one year's growth over the next two decades in order to meet that carbon budget and for us that is a price worth paying in order to avoid the costs and consequences of climate change also that 1% of GDP if we're not on the front front if we're not making the right investment choices if we bury our heads in the sand and then we're in a carbon constrained world well the costs will be a lot more than 1% of GDP because we'll be having to scrap technologies high carbon technologies that we've invested in and those turn out to be the wrong choices so that is the the least cost path to the 2050 target energy price increases are a very important issue politically at the moment both for the residential sector and also the energy intensives in the context of competitiveness for the iron and steel industry for example but being on this path through the 2020s we've shown we'll have limited energy price impacts and could actually give us relatively low energy prices compared to our competitors elsewhere in the EU so again if we're on the front foot we could have relatively low electricity prices compared to other EU countries near term cost implications are being on this path well in the case of the UK there were significant commitments to support low carbon technology innovation in the context of the spending review and committing to this this medium term fourth carbon budget didn't have any additional spending implications and in terms of policies well again there are various high level policy approaches being developed in the UK at the moment and the fourth carbon budget really will underpin those and will help to take those forward and make those policies into strong robust policies that can deliver emissions reduction I think another question which was raised very commonly particularly by the power industry and by the energy intensive sectors is well what is the relationship between our climate change legislation and the European framework and so in particular a lot of the economy is covered by any EU ETS cap how do we accommodate that in our framework well the EU ETS is not defined at the moment for the 2020s but when it is we will have to align our framework with that European framework so it is important that we are in sync with what's happening in the EU ETS at the European level okay if I just move on to well what's actually happening and I've said it's okay to set or it's good to set very challenging targets but it's also very important to be on the downward path and I think in the past what we've been guilty of in the UK is talking a good game so we've set very ambitious targets but at the same time emissions have not gone down and you can see that this picture shows before the recession there was a gentle reduction in emissions but it was only a gentle reduction what's happened since the recession is that we've got a very significant cut in emissions in 2009 that was about 10% cut at the economy level and it's not surprising that was due to the recession because energy consumption is a function of economic activity and emissions are a function of energy consumption so the 10% reduction was pretty much all in 2009 due to the recession and we highlighted that fact and the government actually when they first saw the figures in 2009 they were going around very jubilant saying yeah we've got emissions down by 10% but I don't think there was there was any grounds for jubilation there and made that very clear what's happened in 2010 is that emissions went up by about 3% but that was purely because of the the cold winter in 2010 so there was a lot more winter heating days in 2010 and 2009 if you look at the underlying trend so we've stripped out that impact of the the cold winter in 2010 the underlying trend is one of broadly flat emissions in the UK at the moment and what you can see there is the red line says well if we continued from where we were in 2010 with the trend in 2010 which is broadly flat slightly falling if you compare that to the green line which is the legislated carbon budgets and then the path to 2050 well obviously there's a big gap between those two lines we need a step change in the pace of emissions reductions in order to meet our legislated carbon budgets and the longer term target and then well what is going to drive that step change it's got to be new policies they're not going to happen on their own people are not suddenly going to become energy efficient we're not suddenly going to see a rush to invest in low carbon generation without a change in the policy framework and so here's a set of things which my organisation has identified as recommended has advised the government on as policies that will drive emissions reductions so electricity market reform we've highlighted the need to change our electricity market to move away from a fully liberalised market and to to give a bit more direction there and introduce long-term contracts and I expect the government this week in the UK will announce new arrangements in line with those recommendations it needs technology support so for example key technologies like ccs carbon capturing storage on coal fire power generation on gas fire power generation in industry as well the government needs to provide money to support that and indeed has committed to do that the green deal which is about getting people to take advantage of energy efficiency opportunities being very proactive as a government in helping people to do what at the end of the day will get their energy bills down is a key thing there's a set of things energy efficiency certification climate change agreements which affect our offices and our industries and again we've recommended changes there very important to support renewable heat technologies which are new in the new UK which are relatively expensive for an interim period and which will need subsidies and again where the government has committed subsidies and then to finish I know it's an important issue here agriculture there is an opportunity to get emissions down not to reduce it to zero but there is an opportunity to reduce emissions and that probably will need new incentives certainly in the UK relative to where we are so let me summarise what I've said about the work of the climate change committee some of the key things we've recommended first of all we recommended the 80% emissions reduction target which still remains valid given our current assessment of the science notwithstanding what you might read in the daily mail the implication of that 2050 target for us is that we should be aiming to reduce emissions in 2030 by about 60% on 1990 levels that's about a 45% emissions reduction relative today given what we have already achieved since 1990 the carbon budget that is consistent with that 2030 targets that 1,950 megatons which was highly controversial but is now on the statute book in the UK since last week so that is framing everything we do over the next decade to prepare for that longer term emissions reduction path the costs associated it with the costs associated with it are 1% of GDP and anything less ambitious there just commits us to higher cost in the future so if we want to minimise the cost if we want to maximise economic growth then we should be on this path consistent with the the legislative carbon budget and in terms of policies well we need to do something to get on the down with path for emissions to make it credible that we can achieve these very ambitious carbon budgets we've committed to and that will need new policies and I think that will be the test of this whole framework can we get those policies in place can we go from a situation where emissions at the moment in an underlying sense of flat can we get on the downward path and can we do that pretty soon and certainly my organisation our focus now will be holding the feet to the fire for the government and making sure that we get the policies in place that we get emissions down and then that we can prosper in a carbon constrained world thank you