Green frontrunner or indebted culprit? Assessing Denmark’s climate targets in light of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement

Abstract

This paper contributes to academic and policy debates about climate leadership by illustrating an approach to examining national emission reduction targets focusing on Denmark. Widely recognized as a climate leader, Denmark is cherished for both its historical track record and its current climate targets. With a target of 70% emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 1990 stipulated in national law, central actors in Danish policymaking claim that domestic climate policy is aligned with the Paris temperature goals and present Denmark as a ‘green frontrunner.’ We examine the pledges and targets enshrined in the Danish Climate Act in reference to a 1.5 °C global greenhouse gas budget using five different approaches to burden sharing. For all five approaches, we find that the Danish climate target is inadequate given the 1.5 °C goal. Moreover, when only looking at equity approaches for distributive climate justice globally, the Danish target appears drastically insufficient. Denmark is, in this sense, not a green frontrunner but rather an indebted culprit, challenging the dominant narrative in Danish climate policy. Our results thus call into question the premise of the claim of Danish climate leadership, which works to legitimize existing policy and obscure the many dimensions of climate change.

Applying environmental sustainability boundaries for climate change in life cycle assessment: A review of approaches and implications for policymaking

“…In order to apply the operationalization approaches to the case study, we needed to downscale the safe operating space (SOS) for climate change to the assessed system, that is, defining the share of safe operating space (SoSOS) available for the EU27 + UK. Downscaling the SOS can be handled in several ways by applying different sharing principles (Bjørn et al, 2020) and there is no consensus of a fair way to downscale to individual countries (Tilsted & Bjørn, 2023;van den Berg et al, 2020). Here, we illustratively applied the principle of equal per capita, which has been widely applied in the literature (Dao et al, 2018;Fang et al, 2015;Lucas et al, 2020;Nykvist et al, 2013).…”

“…Therefore, the downscaled global net-zero emissions, applying equal per capita, will in all cases also be net-zero. Deciding which countries should reach net-zero before others is a discussion that belongs to the distributive justice theory's theme and is widely discussed in other studies (Tilsted & Bjørn, 2023;van den Berg et al, 2020), and will not be touched upon here. However, it should be kept in mind that more developed countries are likely expected to reach net-zero emissions sooner than less developed countries, in which case the EU27 + UK would need to reach net-zero emissions sooner than for the global scenario.…”

Global crisis governance in response to scientific information: Comparing and understanding regulatory responses from WHO and IPCC concerning the COVID-19 and climate crises

“…Denmark serves as a pilot case study for the analysis of governance responses at the nation state level. It is a Nordic and European country that responded largely in line with WHO advice (Marin 2020), and also a (self-professed) climate-change leader (Tilsted and Bjørn 2023). Partly based on this pilot research, we plan to later consider other countries' governance responses.…”

Raising the bar: What determines the ambition level of corporate climate targets?

“…While this growing number of corporate climate targets provides an optimistic outlook that the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels could eventually be ful lled, the ambitiousness and the effectiveness of these targets is still highly contested (Tilsted and Bjørn 2023).…”