Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Carbon Emissions

(asked on 13th December 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to help achieve net zero emissions by 2050.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 21st December 2021

Our plan for Net Zero will generate thousands of well-paid jobs here in the UK, help us develop thriving, leading-edge green industries, strengthen our energy security, and improve our health and well-being. Acting now will put us at the forefront of large, expanding global markets and allow us to capitalise on export opportunities so that the UK becomes an importer rather than a customer of the technology of the future. This is why the Government's approach will be tech-led using the best of British technology and innovation – just as we did in the last industrial revolution – to help make homes and buildings warmer, the air cleaner and our journeys greener, all while creating thousands of jobs in new future-proof industries.

Our Net Zero Strategy sets out a plan to:

  • Level up our country supporting up to 190,000 green jobs in 2025 and up to 440,000 jobs across net zero sectors in 2030
  • Build a secure, home-grown energy sector which ends our dependency on volatile foreign gas prices, which will help protect consumers and businesses.
  • Leverage new private investments of up to £90 billion by 2030 levelling-up our former industrial heartlands.
  • The policies and spending brought forward in the Net Zero Strategy mean that since the Ten Point Plan, we have mobilised £26 billion of government capital investment for the green industrial revolution. More than £5.8 billion of foreign investment in green projects has also been secured since the launch of the Ten Point Plan, along with at least 56,000 jobs in the UK’s clean industries.
  • Take a credible and conservative approach to cutting our climate emissions, putting us on track to meet our carbon reduction targets, including our Nationally Determined Contribution (68% reduction by 2030) and Carbon Budget 6 (78% 2035) - building on our successes since 2010.

We set out the steps Defra is taking to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 in the Net Zero Strategy. This includes:

  • Boosting the existing £640m Nature for Climate Fund with a further £124m of new money, ensuring total spend of more than £750m by 2025 on peat restoration, woodland creation and management.
  • Trebling woodland creation rates by the end of this Parliament, reflecting England’s contribution to meeting the UK’s overall target of increasing planting rates to 30,000 hectares per year by the end of this Parliament and maintain new planting at least at this level from 2025 onwards.
  • Restoring approximately 280,000 hectares of peatlands in England by 2050.
  • Supporting low carbon farming and agricultural innovation, through the Farming Investment Fund and the Farming Innovation Programme, as well as future environmental land management schemes.
  • Investing £75 million on net zero related R&D across natural resources, waste and f-gases, to inform our pathway to 2037.
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