Government will present this Tuesday the "Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality" for 2050, which will serve as a basis for the country's strategies for the coming decades in the fight against climate change.

 

A rapid electrification of all transports, the end of coal in electricity production as early as 2030, with renewable energies assuming, at that time, about 80% of electricity production in the country, mainly based on solar photovoltaic that will grow much, and in the wind. The target is to achieve 100% renewable electricity production by 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 will be 85 to 99% less than they were in 2005.

 

These are some of the key goals outlined in the "Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality - RNC 2050", the document that will be the basis for policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors of climate change. The document is presented this Tuesday by the government at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, with the presence of the Environment Minister. Energy, transport, waste, industry, agriculture, forests, all sectors are covered and each one has a share of emissions reduction, so that carbon neutrality can be achieved by the middle of the century.

 

In practice, it is not possible to reduce emissions to zero. But, as the roadmap shows, it is possible to achieve carbon neutrality, that is, a zero balance between the emissions produced in the country and those that the national forest sector can absorb. These are the accounts that the document does. The roadmap foresees a reduction in emissions between 85% and 99% in 2050 compared to 2005 (86.1 million tonnes), which means that at that time there will be between 13 million and 0 , 9 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in Portugal. The role of the carbon dioxide sink (absorption) in these values ??will fit the forest.

 

The electricity sector is one of the central axes in this roadmap, since it depends on others also fundamental, as is the case of transport, which will undergo a real green revolution. In the production of electricity, photovoltaic solar will assume a major role right now - the script estimates that in 2030 this is even the dominant technology in this sector. It will be in that year also that coal ceases to enter these accounts. With this radical change the energy dependence of the outside also decreases substantially. From the current mark of 80% of imported electricity, Portugal goes from less than 60% in 2030, to 2050 with the current inverted values, in which the country can produce more than 80% of the electricity it consumes, all using renewable energy sources.

 

In transportation, the changes will also be radical, with a very rapid transition to electric vehicles. This transformation will already be under way in 2030, a year in which there are no new diesel cars in the country in all transports, individual or collective, to reach 2050 with a matrix almost 100% electric transports.

 

This is a long-term plan, which requires long-term strategies, which is not in line with the four-year political cycles that have characterized the country's life, and some people argue that it should be formally part of all political forces. This is the case of the environmental organization Zero, which advocates "the creation of a climate law" by Parliament to formalize this collective commitment even before the next legislative elections in the next few years. "This legislation is fundamental to align climate policy in the coming decades with the objectives of the Paris Accord and to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050," Zero argues.

 

 

Source, Diário de Notícias.