Family photo of G7 Ministers of Climate, Energy and Environment, meeting in Venaria Reale near Turin, Italy, April 29, 2024 (AFP/Marco BERTORELLO)
The ministers of the G7 countries meeting until Tuesday in Italy are close to an agreement on the closure of their coal-fired power plants “during the first half of the 2030s”, a source told AFP on Monday.
Turin (north) hosts the first major political meeting on climate since COP28 in December in Dubai, where the world committed to gradually giving up coal, gas and oil.
Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and environmental campaigners have urged the G7 — which includes Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States — to lead by example.
The latest draft final communiqué calls for “phasing out current coal-fired electricity generation in our energy systems during the first half of the 2030s or in a timetable consistent with maintaining a limit on temperature increase at 1.5°C, in line with net zero emissions trajectories,” according to a European source.
The two days of discussions in Turin, the historic heart of the Italian automobile industry, must end on Tuesday with the publication of a final press release.
A precise timetable would be welcomed as an important step. Some countries like France are campaigning for the G7 to abandon coal by 2030, but Japan in particular, where a third of its electricity comes from coal, is reluctant to set a deadline.
Italy, which chairs the G7 this year, has already committed to closing its coal-fired power plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia, which should follow in 2028.
Together, the G7 countries represent 38% of the global economy and are responsible for 21% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to figures for 2021 from the Institute for Climate Analysis.
The 2015 Paris Agreement set a global warming target limited to “well below” two degrees above pre-industrial levels, with a limit of 1.5 degrees if possible.
To be able to reach this 1.5 degree target, UN experts estimate that emissions must be reduced by almost half over the current decade, but they continue to grow, in particular because of the burning of fossil fuels.
© 2024 AFP
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