Decarbonisation timeline: The road to 2050

Why 2050?

The Paris Agreement – agreed at COP 21 in December 2015 - commits its 190+ signatories to keeping a rise in global temperatures this century below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
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Following adoption of the Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the UN body set up to provide governments with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies – reported, in October 2018, that if this target is to be met, emissions will need to be brought to net zero by the mid-century. So each signatory to the Paris Agreement has been submitting how it will contribute towards this aim – these are known as "nationally determined contributions". (the EU has submitted one paper that covers all the countries in the EU.) And then each signatory is taking the legal, regulatory and policy steps it needs to fulfil its commitments.
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This timeline sets out the principle legal, regulatory and policy milestones towards that goal.