About the Campaign
Tackling black carbon emissions represents a huge opportunity to reduce the UK’s climate impact. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have a long life in the atmosphere; it therefore takes many years before emission cuts have an impact on the concentration in the atmosphere. Measures to cut emissions of carbon dioxide can be relatively expensive and take years or even decades to implement.
Black carbon has a short life in the atmosphere – if emissions are cut then the impacts are felt very quickly as black carbon is removed from the atmosphere via natural processes. Measures to reduce black carbon emissions are relatively cheap and can be implemented quickly. Short term measures to tackling black carbon emissions therefore have a good fit with longer term measures to radically reduce the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions: we can immediately reduce climate impacts at the same time as protecting our climate for decades and centuries to come.
Despite this huge opportunity to reduce our country’s climate impacts the UK has no targets for reducing black carbon emissions. Black carbon is not included in the Kyoto protocol (the UN international climate change agreement) or in the UK’s domestic targets under Climate Change Act 2008.
The Black Carbon Counts for Climate Campaign aims to raise awareness of the need to reduce these emissions and to ensure the UK develops demanding targets and strategies for reducing black carbon emissions.
