The EU must focus on implementing laws to meet its 2030 emission reduction goal of 40% before considering any increase in ambition from 2020, Europe’s climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said on Monday.

“For 2020 we can come along with more ambition, it will be for the next Commission,” Miguel Arias Canete told a webstreamed press conference in Brussels. The current Commission is in place until 2019.

He said that for the next three years the bloc will be focused on implementing laws to meet the 2030 goal – including the post-2020 EU ETS reform proposal published in July and a non-ETS sector proposal due in the first half of next year.

The Paris Agreement struck over the weekend features a voluntary ‘stocktake’ of how national pledges are contributing to a long-term target in 2018 and a voluntary revisiting of pledges in 2020. The first binding stocktake is in 2023, with a binding revisiting of pledges in 2025.

Analysts have suggested that the national pledges would only limit global temperatures to 2.7C above pre-industrial levels, well short of the binding Paris Agreement goal of “well below 2C”.

During the Paris conference, Arias Canete said having a review before 2020 would mean the 28-nation bloc and many other countries would come under pressure to up their goals as low-carbon technologies advanced and get cheaper amid scaled up investment.

In a further signal made just after the Agreement was made, France’s President Francois Hollande said: “I commit to revising our emissions targets and financial targets by 2020.”  This would likely apply to France’s unilateral national goal.

Any deepening of the overall EU pledge would almost certainly mean a tighter cap for the ETS, which regulates around half of the bloc’s GHG output.

By Ben Garside – ben@carbon-pulse.com