🇱🇺This week’s carbon management EU country spotlight: Luxembourg 🇱🇺

Unlike most countries I’ve spotlighted in this series so far, Luxembourg does not have a formal carbon management plan that involves carbon removal (#CDR) technology. This perhaps makes sense for a country responsible for a very small percentage of emissions in the #EU (0.34%). Nonetheless, Luxembourg is a major financial center in the EU and has been demonstrating serious innovation in CDR policy, making it a fantastic case study to look at.

What does Luxembourg’s climate policy framework look like?

✅ The country’s climate law sets a net zero goal by 2050, with an emissions reduction goal of 50-55% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

⏳The Long Term Strategy (#LTS) states that carbon removals only be used for unavoidable emissions.

❗The country has little mention of technological CDR and is generally against carbon capture and storage (#CCS).

📉 Luxembourg's emissions account for 0.34% of the EU total and have fallen by almost 12% since 2005. This is below the EU-wide emissions reduction of 19% in the same period.

How does Luxembourg view CDR?

🌲The focus in the country is on the land use, land use change and forestry (#LULUCF) sectors, with subsidies set aside for forestry projects. Luxembourg promotes sustainable forest management and reforestation, crop diversification, a ban on permanent grassland plowing, and further research to increase carbon sinks.

📝In November, the Parliament saw a proposal of the Luxembourg Negative Emissions Tariff (L-NET), a first-of-its-kind legislation that would aim to leverage the country’s wealth to drive innovation and growth of negative emissions technologies like Direct Air Carbon Capture (#DACC) by procuring CDR domestically and abroad.

🔥Regarding carbon sink functions in the #LULUCF sector, Luxembourg's 2019 net emissions were 12.4 MtCO2e. The country is expecting removals from LULUCF to stagnate at 0.4 MtCO2e.

Luxembourg’s climate policy framework does not yet articulate CDR methodologies. I’m curious to see whether this is due to change in the coming years, especially with new research emerging from the IPCC that emission reductions alone are not enough to reach net zero in the EU (see this post for a refresh: https://lnkd.in/eQB8HnaF). The L-NET in particular presents a unique approach to CDR procurement. It could provide an interesting blueprint for other nations to follow. Huge shoutout to The OpenAir Collective for pushing this policy in Luxembourg.

🤔What do you think about Luxembourg’s current policy framework? What would you add to this analysis that I’ve missed? Anything else you would like to share about Luxembourg’s climate goals?