The pandemic year 2020 with its drop in CO2 was merely an outlier — that's what the latest calculations from the Wegener Center at the University of Graz clearly show: Austria's emissions rose by around 6.5 per cent last year, bringing them back to 1990 levels, the baseline for the Paris climate targets.

30 Years Wasted

The current figures from the University of Graz show that Austria is miles away from achieving the necessary reductions — or to put it another way: Austria has squandered over 30 years in terms of progress towards climate neutrality and now finds itself near the bottom of the EU-27 rankings.

What's needed now is something close to an emergency stop if Austria is to become climate neutral by 2040, as set out in the government programme: "On the path to climate neutrality, we have a total of no more than 700 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents available from 2021 onwards," says Graz climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast: "This means that Austria must achieve a reduction of at least 95 per cent by 2040, with at least 90 per cent of that coming primarily from the areas of fossil energy and industry."

Source: ORF.at https://steiermark.orf.at/stories/3163980/

Listen here to Gottfried Kirchengast's contribution on the Morgenjournal on Ö1