The Generalitat Valenciana presents its Climate Change Law to reduce emissions by 40% in 2030

The Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development, Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition, Mireia Mollà, has presented the draft of the Valencian Law on Climate Change and Ecological Transition, “one of the central policies of this legislature” at the head of the Conselleria. The new law is announced as “a necessary plan to stop the steps in the opposite direction”, given the growth in emissions registered in recent years, both at the state level and in the Valencian Community.

To reverse this trend, the draft points to “necessary, transparent, courageous objectives with no lesser objectives”, said Mollà in reference to the main purposes: a reduction in emissions of at least 40% in 2030 and 100% of clean energy in 2050.

According to Mollà, objectives that in “some cases are more ambitious than those included in the state standard”, and that establish by 2030 a reduction in emissions of at least 20%, compared to 1990 levels, a figure that halves the horizon established by Valencian law.

“We have to rethink our relationship with the world around us. We have to do a greater exercise of reduction and containment. Efforts of the entire Valencian society both individually and collectively, “said the minister.

The draft comes just nine months after the Consell approved the Declaration of Climate Emergency last September. A time, recalled the minister, which could have been reduced to only six months if the health emergency of COVID-19 had not interrupted the date scheduled for the presentation of this law on March 12.

A context of crisis that the minister has linked “closely with the climate emergency” and that forces us to “become aware that the health of the Planet is our own health and to settle the new normal on the principles of the just ecological transition”.

Mollà, accompanied by the regional secretary of Climate Emergency, Paula Tuzón, the general director of Climate Change, Celsa Monrós, and the general director of Ecological Transition, Antonio García, has shelled the main axes of the future law, which starts from the recognition of the Valencian Community as the epicenter of climate change and that is fixed in the characteristics of this territory in consumption, fuels, natural resources and opportunities available to define adapted strategies to combat global warming, such as the management of forests as carbon sinks.

The Minister has marked the four lines on which the new Valencian standard will work: energy, territory, mobility and green taxation.

In energy, it has appealed to efficiency, renewable energies and savings. “Three strategies to achieve renewable energy percentages of 42% by 2030, in line with European targets and state forecasts, and an improvement in energy efficiency of 35.4%: almost 3 points above the recent ‘Clean Energy Package’ of the European Union, explained Mollà.

The democratization of clean energy will be promoted by the Renewable Energy Master Plan of the Ministry. “We have to make a leap in quality in terms of the expansion and use of renewable energies,” said Mireia Mollà, who highlighted initiatives to make this type of facilities more flexible and favored, such as the creation of Local Energy Communities: “La Valenciana is the first Autonomous Community that will regulate by law this figure of local participation in renewable energy facilities.”

To fulfill these binding purposes, the Ministry is endowed with an Integrated Valencian Energy and Climate Change Plan, “an instrument, integrated and transversal, of management and planning of the sectoral objectives and the specific actions that will be developed to respond to the purposes of this law”, and that will be executed by the Valencian Agency for Climate Change.

In reference to territorial actions, the proposed law refers to the establishment of priority development zones, in collaboration with municipalities, or to the right of surface, two mechanisms dedicated to simplifying the implementation of projects promoted by cooperatives, local energy communities or even local corporations.

Mobility

“We will create a public network of charging points that guarantees the supply to users of electric means of transport”, announced Mollà within the main measures in mobility along with sustainable transport and pedestrianization formulas, through restricted access to low emission areas.

Transport, responsible for 44% of the emissions of the Valencian Community, “is closely linked to green taxation, which articulates a fund with a finalist character to assume investments in Ecological Transition, in addition to having an item of the regional budgets and financing that “recognizes both the State Government and the European Green Deal”.

“A necessarily just transition”

The minister has stressed that “social justice is the thread that will cross all the actions of Ecological Transition, which will necessarily be just”. “It is essential that it is a change of model that leaves no one out, through the Valencian Just Transition Strategy, the Just Transition Agreements and the Action Plan against Energy Poverty. Three specific inclusive and inclusive measures”.

Another of the novelties with which the consellera has begun her presentation, has to do with the key role of a “society formed and informed co-responsible for collective action to react before having to alleviate the damages”.

To this end, it defends including environmental education in the school curriculum, to “create a generation of responsible people with a new way of producing and consuming”, and has committed to “work on the new norm from the transparency of a realistic and honest bill proposal”.

Source: Retema