Adopt effective climate protection law

A binding climate protection law is essential for Austria to establish clear framework conditions for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and to secure climate targets in the long term. Without a legal anchoring, climate protection often depends on political majorities and can be delayed or diluted. Such a law provides companies, administration, and citizens with planning security and ensures transparency and reliability in climate policy. It also helps to avoid financial risks due to penalties for missed EU targets.

Regierungsprogramm 2025-29 auto-translated using AI

Creating a governance structure to achieve climate targets

A climate law creates the regulatory framework for measures, tools and governance to achieve climate targets and climate neutrality, climate change adaptation, and the circular economy. It includes binding annual caps on national total emissions. It establishes and regulates, among other things, the tasks of a climate governance structure, establishes climate checks in the impact-oriented impact assessment (WFA), sets the process of the National Climate and Energy Plan (NEKP), and defines the framework of a climate-neutral administration. It establishes and regulates the task of an inter-ministerial steering group and defines a correction mechanism in the event of exceeding the binding annual caps on total emissions. The focus is on overall responsibility and flexibility between sectors. The steering group is responsible for the development of a climate roadmap, which serves as a planning tool and includes both monitoring and indicative reduction paths or greenhouse gas budgets for each
sector, which are compared with projections of emission developments. The climate roadmap also presents, in accordance with the goal of climate neutrality 2040, the measures of the federal government and the federal states. The involvement of federal states and municipalities, social partners and civil society is ensured and a scientific expert advisory board is established.

Forderungen des Klimarats der Bürger:innen 2022 auto-translated using AI

Adopt an effective climate protection law immediately

The current draft of the Climate Protection Act must be scientifically reflected on its effectiveness for CO2 neutrality, followed immediately - as soon as possible and at the latest by the end of the third quarter of 2022 - adopted and come into force immediately. The law must include clear target specifications as well as an effective accountability mechanism and additionally review and sanction mechanisms.

A party-independent, non-instructional climate commission must review the laws and measures of the federal and state governments for their climate effectiveness, accompany their implementation in the federal and state governments, and if necessary, make recommendations. The federal and state governments must be obliged to comment on the reviews and explain how they deal with the recommendations of the climate commission. A generally understandable report of the climate commission with the original statements will be published in an accessible and easily findable manner.