Denmark's Climate Targets

The Danish Council on Climate Change has an official advisory role in setting climate targets

The 2020 Danish Climate Act sets the framework for Danish climate policy. Among other things, the Act governs how and when national climate targets are to be decided, and it describes the institutional setup and tasks of the Danish Council on Climate Change. One of the tasks of the council is to assist the government and Parliament in setting future climate targets, and this report is the council’s first input to the discussions on updating current targets and formulating a new 2035 target.

The Climate Act makes climate targets highly topical. Every five years, the government must present a new climate target with a 10-year horizon. The next climate target needs to be agreed in 2025, and it will set the ambition for 2035. In addition to this, the Act states that, after a general election, the incoming government must review the existing 2030 target. The current 2030 target is a 70% reduction in all domestic greenhouse gas emissions compared to emissions in 1990.

This report investigates whether Danish climate targets align with the Paris Agreement

The main objective of this report is to present an analytical framework to answer the following question: Are the current or potential future Danish climate targets aligned with the Paris Agreement’s ambition: “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”?

Since the Paris Agreement’s ambition is open to interpretation, there is no single definitive answer to this question. According to our report, the answer depends on three questions: 

• How do you interpret the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement?
• What level of certainty for keeping temperatures below a given threshold do you aim for?
• What is a fair contribution from Denmark to reaching the global temperature goal?

Only under certain conditions can the Danish climate targets be considered to align with the Paris Agreement

The table below shows different combinations of answers to the three questions above. As shown, only in two of the total 12 combinations can Denmark’s climate targets be said to align with the temperature goal in the Paris Agreement. Put simply, the Danish targets are only Paris-aligned if you allow a 1.5°C overshoot, grant the same emissions per capita to Denmark as the rest of the world, and use the median temperature estimate of the climate model applied.