Finland latest to signal interest in Climate Change Act

The campaign to deliver national climate change bills across Europe has received a further boost after both Finland and Hungary edged forward with plans to develop legislation loosely modelled on the UK Climate Change Act.

Over recent months Friends of the Earth and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been hosting a series of seminars in European embassies designed to promote the benefits of the UK's Climate Change Act, which was introduced in 2008 and provides legally binding emission targets and carbon budgets on successive governments.

The campaign appears to have secured its first major victory after the Hungarian government last month launched a draft version of its own climate change bill, while yesterday a senior Finnish MP said the government was preparing to commission a study that would look at the feasibility of adopting similar legislation.

Speaking at a seminar at the British Embassy in Helsinki [full disclosure - BusinessGreen.com editor James Murray also spoke at the event] Oras Tynkkynen, a Green Party MP and the government's climate policy specialist, said the government had already commissioned a legal feasibility report that had concluded there were "no insurmountable legal barriers" to adopting a climate change bill. He added that it was now preparing to undertake a political study of how such legislation might work.

He acknowledged such a bill would face numerous challenges, noting that Finnish businesses are particularly wary of measures that could compromise their international competitiveness, while variations in weather and the availability of zero carbon hydro power from neighbouring Norway could make it difficult for the government to consistently comply with annual carbon budgets.

The Finnish political system could also pose a challenge to any legislation that too closely mirrors the framework set out under the UK act, as new Finnish bills have to be more proscriptive than their UK counterparts and provide details of how policies will work.

However, Tynkkynen argued that a bill loosely modelled on the British Climate Change Act would help bolster the business case for low carbon technologies, accelerate cuts in Finnish greenhouse gas emissions and provide businesses with greater certainty over clean tech investments.

The Finnish government will now join the Irish and German governments in undertaking detailed assessments of the viability of binding climate change acts.

The news was welcomed by Martyn Williams of Friends of the Earth, which having led the campaign that resulted in the UK Climate Change Act now has similar initiatives under way in 16 different EU countries. "The UK had the first climate change act, but we hope it won't be the last and that it also becomes the worst as other countries do better," he said.