the UK budget

a fair share of the global carbon cake

Using the Contraction and Convergence (C&C) model, we can work out a potential 'carbon budget’ for the UK. By doing so, we can develop year-on-year estimates of how we need to reduce our CO2 emissions over the coming decade, which will be a big help when considering future plans and strategies. The C&C figures will also provide a 'reality check' with the new five year targets being set by the government under the Climate Change Bill (which of course have a goal of 80% CO2 reductions by 2050). Keeping within the C&C budget will be helped by the fact that the government is now measuring emissions across the country each year, and publishing results at national, regional and local authority levels, so that we can all see how well we are doing against our 'fair share' – in fact we have used the latest government figures to determine what our individual emissions are now!

The way we have calculated the budget is to take the C&C per-capita figures for each person in England for 10 years, 2008-2017, and then multiplied that by the expected number of people in the UK for each year over the same time period. The resulting figures are:

Year               C&C                 UK Pop           UK Budget

               Per-capita CO2    (Millions)     (Million Tonnes CO2)

2008             8.06              59.94               483

2009             7.83              60.11               471

2010             7.59              60.28               458

2011             7.35              60.44               444

2012             7.09              60.60               430

2013             6.83              60.76               415

2014             6.57              60.92               401

2015             6.28              61.27               385

2016             6.01              61.31               369

2017             5.73              61.55               353

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