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The article discusses the state of climate policy in the face of multiple crises and opportunities for system transformations. While global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and geopolitical tensions are high, there have been positive developments such as the falling costs of clean energy technologies and the increasing role of various actors in climate finance. Climate policy is increasingly integrating with sustainable development goals and adaptation planning, although more action and international climate finance are needed. The article also highlights the growth and impact of the Climate Policy journal, which has covered a wide range of topics and seen an increase in quality and submissions. The outgoing editors express gratitude to the reviewers, associate editors, and editorial board members, and welcome the incoming editors-in-chief. [Extracted from the article]

The German Federal Climate Change Act includes binding annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets for the economic sectors energy, industry, buildings, transport, agriculture and waste. For sectors that fail to meet their targets, climate policy measures have to be implemented immediately. However, some sectors may only have achieved their targets thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, while others may have missed their targets because of COVID-19. For policy making, it is therefore important to disentangle the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic from the effects of policy and other drivers on emissions. In this paper, the effects of the pandemic on GHG emissions in Germany in 2020 are estimated at the national level and at the levels of the economic sectors. Counterfactual emissions are estimated here based on autoregressive econometric models, thereby distinguishing between different factors of emissions based on decomposition analysis. The findings at the national level suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic lowered GHG emissions in 2020 in Germany by about 41 Mt CO2-eq (5.15%) compared to counterfactual emissions. Accordingly, about 58% of the reduction in emissions between 2019 and 2020 in Germany may be attributed to the pandemic. The findings at the sectoral level imply that without the COVID-19 pandemic, all sectors with the exception of the transport sector, would have met their emissions target in 2020 as set in the Federal Climate Change Act. The transport sector would have missed its emission target in 2020 without COVID-19, suggesting that existing policies were not strong enough to bend the curve of emissions trends sufficiently down. In contrast, the buildings sector failed to meet its target in 2020 because of COVID-19, prompting immediate climate policy measures in this sector. The COVID-19 pandemic lowered greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Germany in 2020 by 5.5% compared to counterfactual emissions and accounted for about 58% of total estimated reductions between 2019 and 2020. Without COVID-19, all sectors but the transport sector would have met their emissions targets. Climate policy response should take into account the effects of extraordinary events like COVID-19 suppressing GHG emissions based on counterfactual emissions because failure to implement measures early on may turn out to be costly in the medium term once the transitory emissions reductions no longer occur. Counterfactual emissions should be considered prior to crediting emissions surplus or deficit to subsequent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued here that stringent, early emission reductions are necessary in order to minimize 'dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system' (DAI), the stated Objective of Article 2 of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). Given probability distribution functions (pdfs) for climate sensitivity and the temperature threshold for harm consistent with currently available evidence, and accepting a 10% risk of unacceptable damage as the threshold for 'danger', it is not possible to avoid DAI. Having adopted a precautionary approach in setting emission trajectories, the possibility arises that future resolution of uncertainties concerning climate sensitivity and the harm threshold may show the climate sensitivity to be low (1-2 K) and the harm threshold high (2 K rather than 1 K). Using a simple coupled climate-carbon cycle model, it is shown that if the climate sensitivity were to be definitively determined to be 2 K in 2020, then the emission reductions achieved by that time and planned for the next two decades are still fully needed. Only if climate sensitivity is very low (1 K) and the harm threshold is high (2 K) would the emissions achieved by 2020 not have been fully necessary. However, this would still lead to changes in ocean chemistry that are likely to be highly detrimental to marine life. Thus, when the full spectrum of impacts is considered, there is no plausible set of assumptions under which stringent near-term emission reductions are rendered unnecessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]