The Carbon Brief Profile: Germany

Germany has a long history as an industrial powerhouse and it remains a centre of European manufacturing.

As of 2023, it had the 12th highest emissions in the world.

The nation was an early leader in developing wind and solar power.

Its “Energiewende” policies have driven a surge in these technologies over the past two decades, at the same time as winding down its sizable nuclear power sector.

However, Germany still uses more coal than any other country in Europe.

The shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also exposed its reliance on fossil-fuel imports, particularly gas.

Germany has often been framed as a “climate leader” on the world stage.

But the recent coalition government has struggled with internal disputes and there has been some backsliding on its climate targets.

In particular, Germany has repeatedly failed to meet its obligations at the national and EU levels to cut emissions from its cars and houses.

In recent years, there has also been a growing backlash from some quarters to some of its net-zero policies.

Politics

Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the third-largest in the world, after the US and China. It is also the most populous country in the EU, home to around 83 million people.

It is a parliamentary democracy and a federal republic, made up of 16 states. The federal president is the official German head of state, but the greatest decision-making powers lie with the chancellor.

By the middle of the 20th century, Germany had been left devastated by two world wars. It was subsequently divided into two countries, the capitalist west and the communist east, during the Cold War.

West Germany underwent an “economic miracle”, or Wirtschaftswunder, in the 1950s, which set the stage for modern Germany’s status as Europe’s industrial hub.

Today, the nation still has major manufacturing, engineering and automotive sectors, although its industrial output has seen modest declines in the past decade.

Even following the reunification of the country in 1990, there has remained a pronounced divide between states that fall within the historic nations of West and East Germany. The east remains less wealthy, hosts fewer immigrants and posts increasing support for populist and far-right politics.

This divide is also visible in attitudes towards climate issues, including levels of opposition to renewables and concern about climate change. Overall, however, 77% of Germans consider climate change a “very serious problem” according to Eurobarometer polling in 2023.

Germany has a multi-party system and votes using a mixed electoral system, with half of the members of the lower house elected through proportional representation.

As a result, all but one of the governments that have ruled West or reunified Germany since 1949 have been coalitions between two or more parties. (East Germany was a one-party state.)

The two dominant parties have traditionally been the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). The CDU also has a regional Bavarian “sister party”, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which is part of a single faction in parliament with the CDU.

Both of the major parties have histories of supporting renewable energy and climate action, domestically and on the world stage. Former CDU leader Angela Merkel, who led the country for 16 years up to 2021, was dubbed the “climate chancellor”, although she was ultimately criticised for failing to do enough to cut Germany’s emissions.

The current chancellor, the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, took over in 2021 at a time of heightened climate interest in Germany. He has ruled in a “traffic-light” coalition – named after the parties’ colours – with the Green Party and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), an economically liberal party that prioritises free markets and privatisation.

(Green politics has a long and successful history in Germany. The West German Green Party was the first of its kind to enter mainstream politics globally, winning 27 parliamentary seats in the 1983 election.)

The SPD, FDP and Green coalition collapsed at the end of 2024, following FDP clashes with its centre-left partners on climate policy and other issues.

German parties reached a deal to form a coalition government in Berlin, on November 24, 2021. Credit: Ralph Pache / Alamy Stock Photo.

Other major parties include the Left Party, a democratic socialist group that is the successor to the ruling party of East Germany. It typically supports ambitious climate policies, but its support base in the east of the country has dwindled.

East Germany, in particular, has seen the rapid rise of the explicitly climate-sceptic and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in recent years. AfD won a state election in 2024, marking what was described as the first win for the German far right “since the Nazis”.

(Germany’s Nazi past has led to a consensus in mainstream politics that far-right groups should not be allowed into government again. This “firewall” has so far prevented parties from forming coalitions with the AfD, although the CDU sparked controversy in early 2025 by cooperating with the party on an opposition anti-immigration bill, which failed to pass.)

Finally, a new party emerged in 2024 as an offshoot of the Left Party, called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). It has been viewed as a potential left-wing populist competitor for the AfD and it, too, has called for the rollback of some climate policies.

Populist parties contribute to what has been described as an “anti-environmental backlash” in Germany. Certain policies – such as replacing gas boilers with heat pumps – have become highly polarising in recent years.

Beyond Germany’s domestic politics, it is also a large and instrumental player within the EU.

The current European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is a CDU politician and a former member of Merkel’s cabinet. In her two terms as commission president, she has been a strong supporter of the European Green Deal.

While Germany has traditionally supported ambitious climate action at the EU level, there has been growing pressure from the political right – including Von der Leyen’s own party – to roll back key policies, such as the 2035 phaseout data for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

Paris pledge

Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were 672.8m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), according to a database published in Scientific Data by Dr Matthew Jones of the University of East Anglia and collaborators. This figure includes emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).

This amounts to an average of 8.1tCO2e per person in 2023. This is higher than the global per-capita average of 6.7tCO2e and also substantially higher than other large European nations, such as France and Italy.

Germany is also the sixth-largest historical emitter of CO2, due to its early industrialisation and intense coal use. Accounting for emissions from former imperial territories increases its historical emissions slightly, although far less than other European colonial powers, such as the UK or the Netherlands.

As an EU member state, Germany has a joint nationally determined contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement that includes a target for cutting emissions across the entire bloc. (It also negotiates as part of the EU party grouping at UN climate talks.)

The EU submitted an update to its 2030 NDC in 2023, reflecting the adoption of its “Fit for 55” package of climate legislation. This reiterated its target to cut emissions to 55% below 1990 levels by 2030, across the EU as a whole.

This overarching target had previously been submitted as an NDC in 2020 and legislated in the European Climate Law. The EU has also submitted a long-term strategy to the UN, reflecting its target to be “climate-neutral” by 2050, as set out in its European Green Deal.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has proposed a 2040 target of cutting emissions to 90% below 1990 levels.

Climate Action Tracker (CAT) – an independent analysis of climate pledges produced by three research organisations – rated the EU’s 2030 NDC target as “insufficient” for achieving the Paris Agreement temperature goal.

The bloc has failed to meet the deadline to submit its third NDC and has indicated that it will not issue this 2035 target until September – just weeks before COP30 in Brazil.

Under the EU’s Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR), member states are assigned targets for emissions that do not fall under the main EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS).

The ESR covers sectors such as road transport and buildings, which Germany – and most other countries – have been slow to decarbonise.

Germany missed its ESR target for the 2013-2020 period and various analyses suggest it is on track to miss the next one out to 2030 as well.

Developed countries are also obliged, under the UN climate regime, to provide climate finance to help developing countries meet their own climate targets.

Germany has consistently been one of the top-three biggest providers of climate finance to developing countries.

The German government announced that it had provided €9.9bn ($10.3bn) of climate finance in 2023. However, Germany has been criticised for relying heavily on loans to deliver climate finance, with the investigative NGO FragDenStaat reporting that €5.1bn ($5.3bn) of the 2023 total was provided in this way.

Germany is also the home of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, which is based in the western city of Bonn.

The annual UNFCCC subsidiary body (SB) meetings take place every June in Bonn, providing climate diplomats time to negotiate ahead of the annual COP climate summits.

Germany has hosted two COPs, including COP1 in Berlin, when then-environment minister Merkel served as COP president.

German environmental minister Angela Merkel, right, receives a wooden mallet to conduct the opening session of the UN summit on climate change, Berlin, 1995. Credit: Jockel Finck / Alamy Stock Photo.

Climate laws and policies

Germany introduced its first national climate law – the Federal Climate Action Act – in 2019. In its current form, the law includes a net-zero goal for 2045 and binding interim targets.

Prior to this, the country had set out its climate goals, such as targeting a 40% reduction in emissions by 2020 from a 1990 baseline, in various government policy programmes.

In 2016, the government scaled up its ambitions in its Climate Action Plan 2050. This document was a response to the Paris Agreement, setting out a long-term target of “extensive greenhouse gas neutrality” by 2050. This was defined as an emissions reduction of 80-95% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

As an EU member state, Germany was already legally obliged to meet its share of climate targets for the entire bloc. However, then-environment minister Svenja Schulze argued that there was still a need for legally binding domestic targets set into a climate law.

(At the time, it seemed likely that Germany would miss its 2020 emissions target. In the end, the target was met, but experts attributed this to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.)

Schulze, an SDP minister, presented a first draft of the climate law early in 2019. It included an ambition at the upper end of the nation’s action plan – to cut emissions by “at least 95%” and achieve emissions neutrality by 2050.

The proposal faced opposition from Merkel’s CDU, the SDP’s coalition partner, which did not want the binding sectoral targets that different ministries would have to stick to. Ultimately, the law passed, but it has undergone various amendments since 2019.

Germany’s target is net-zero for all greenhouse gases by 2045, with interim targets of a 65% emissions cut by 2030 and an 88% cut by 2040, compared to 1990 levels. The nation is also the first major economy to set a “net-negative” goal beyond its net-zero date.

These goals were set in 2021, in response to a supreme court case brought by young climate activists on human rights grounds. The court concluded that the initial law was insufficient and that Germany needed to set clear emissions reduction targets beyond 2030.

Under the law, governments must present “climate action programmes” within a year of the start of each legislative period, to stay on track for their targets. The SPD-Green-FDP coalition presented theirs in 2023, setting out plans for a 65% cut in emissions by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.

Germany’s independent Council of Experts on Climate Change, a group established to monitor progress towards the nation’s emissions targets, has warned repeatedly that Germany is not on track to meet its 2030 target. (This also applies to Germany’s targets under the EU, which align with its national targets.)

The council noted that the 2023 climate action programme would not be enough to reach the 2030 target. Around half of the measures relied on government funding, which had dried up following a supreme court ruling that the government’s transfer of €60bn in unused money from a Covid-19 fund to a major climate fund had been unlawful.

Another amendment to the climate law came in 2024, pushed by the FDP in the coalition government. This effectively weakened the law by removing sectoral targets, spreading responsibility across the whole government and making it harder to scrutinise progress.

This followed repeated warnings that transport and buildings had been missing their emissions goals. Policies to curb emissions from these sectors, such as the Building Energy Act to phase out gas boilers or the 2035 ban on new combustion-engine car sales, have become highly divisive in Germany.

Germany has also set up a national emissions trading system (ETS) for fuels in the heating and transport sectors, which works alongside the EU ETS. These schemes raised €18.5bn in 2024, which will be channelled into Germany’s main “climate fund” to drive more action.

Renewables

Germany has a long history of developing renewables, particularly wind and solar. It generates more renewable power than any other European nation.

This focus has its roots in the “Energiewende” – or energy transition – a concept that entered mainstream German politics in the 2010s, but originated in the environmental movement of the 1970s.

Originally, Energiewende referred to the development of renewables and better energy efficiency, as an alternative to nuclear and imported oil. The concept included the ongoing use of domestic coal, as a way to reduce the need for imported energy.

The term was subsequently co-opted by Merkel in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and has since become synonymous with Germany’s wider climate and energy strategy.

Germany’s rapid rollout of wind and solar means that even as it has phased out nuclear power – which once provided nearly a third of the nation’s electricity – it has still been able to increase the share of clean power in its grid.

As the chart below shows, renewables, including wind, solar, bioenergy and hydropower, provided more than half of Germany’s electricity in 2023. That year, wind power alone overtook coal to become the largest single source of German power.

In 2023, Germany had the fifth largest renewable capacity in the world, with 173 gigawatts (GW). It also had the sixth largest renewable generation, with 265 terawatt hours (TWh).

The CDU-led government of Helmut Kohl introduced Europe’s first “feed-in tariffs” in 1991 to support the early development of wind and solar. These tariffs have been essential for supporting Germany’s renewables industry and have been imitated around the world.

Germany’s early investments are widely credited with kick-starting the dramatic cost reductions seen for solar power generation in recent decades.

In 2000, the SPD-Green coalition government passed the Renewable Energy Act, aiming to double renewables’ share of electricity by 2010. Over the years, the act has been amended several times and scaled up in ambition.

The current goal set out in the act is for Germany to reach 80% renewable power by 2030, rising to 100% by 2035. For 2030, this target is to be supported by 215GW of solar, along with 115GW of onshore wind and 30GW of offshore wind.

These ambitions amount to doubling Germany’s onshore wind capacity, – and quadrupling its solar and offshore wind capacity – between 2022 and the end of the decade.

The SPD-Green-FDP coalition government launched an extensive package of measures in 2022 that included reforms to the Renewable Energy Act, as well as other laws, including those relating to offshore wind and transmission grid development.

The “Easter package” was described by the government as the “biggest energy policy reform in decades”. It was partly framed as a way to ensure energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which exposed Germany’s reliance on foreign fossil fuels.

Overhead power lines and a wind turbine, Witten, North Rhine-Westphalia. Credit: Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.

There has traditionally been cross-party support for renewables in Germany. However, the far-right AfD has taken a firmly anti-renewables stance, calling for an end to wind power expansion.

There has been strong local opposition to wind power in some regions – including eastern Germany, where the AfD is popular. This includes efforts to block turbines being built in forested areas.

Renewables are not evenly distributed across the country. Experts say there is insufficient transmission infrastructure to cope with an increasingly renewables-heavy grid and get the power where it is needed – something policymakers have sought to address.

Finally, bioenergy – particularly biogas – plays a relatively large role in Germany’s energy system. It has been a key part of the Energiewende, with farmers taking advantage of feed-in tariffs from the 2000s onwards to set up small bioenergy plants.

Nearly 10% of the nation’s electricity was provided by bioenergy in 2023, according to Ember data. Bioenergy also provides most of the roughly 18% of heat that is generated by renewable sources in Germany.

Coal

Germany is a major producer and consumer of coal. The fossil fuel powered the nation’s industrial revolution in the 19th century and contributed to its post-war growth in the 1950s.

The nation has the largest proven coal reserves in Europe, according to Energy Institute data.

Historically, both hard – or “black” – coal and lignite – or “brown coal” – were mined in Germany. However, the last hard coal mine closed in 2018, after the government stopped subsidising the industry amid competition from imports and other energy sources.

Nevertheless, lignite mining means that, as of 2023, Germany was still the ninth-biggest coal producer in the world and the biggest in Europe. It mined 130.8m tonnes of lignite that year and remains the second-largest producer of this type of coal, outstripped only by China.

Lignite is cheap to produce and is used in some of Germany’s coal-power plants. However, it has a relatively low energy content and generates more CO2 when burned than hard coal.

This coal is extracted from vast open pit mines, which are highly destructive and have triggered strong opposition from activists. At least 177,300 hectares of countryside have been cleared and hundreds of villages demolished to make way for lignite mining.

The greenhouse gas methane also seeps out of Germany’s lignite mines. Analysis by the thinktank Ember in 2024 concluded that these emissions could be up to 220 times higher than official government reporting suggests.

A protest rally at the Garzweiler opencast mine in Erkelenz, Germany, 2023. Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo.

Germany’s continued burning of coal as an electricity source is a major issue in its climate politics. It is also a source of constant criticism from overseas commentators, who argue that Germany could have cut its coal use more quickly by keeping nuclear plants open.

In absolute terms, coal remains a larger source of electricity in Germany than in any country in Europe. Still, coal-fired electricity generation has fallen by nearly two-thirds over the past decade, from 274TWh in 2014 to 105TWh in 2024, according to industry data.

The transition away from coal has implicitly been part of the German Energiewende since around 2011. However, setting a coal phaseout date has been politically fraught and the country has long been committed to phasing out nuclear power first.

Growing civil society pressure pushed the government to establish a Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment in the coal sector in 2018. The commission was focused on the question of a just transition for coal workers.

Two years later, the government adopted the Coal Phaseout Act, which committed to ending coal power in Germany by 2038 “at the latest”, as well as setting interim goals.

The phaseout is slower for domestic German lignite than for imported hard coal. The act was accompanied by compensation for companies and ”structural support” for mining regions.

Experts argue that Germany’s coal phaseout should be moved earlier to help meet the nation’s climate goals. In their 2021 coalition agreement, the SPD-Green-FDP government aimed to “ideally” move the coal phaseout date to 2030, but this was never set into law.

The government did announce a 2030 phaseout for the industrial western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the German climate website Clean Energy Wire, the government also “expect[ed] carbon pricing to make coal plant operation economically unviable before the deadline” in eastern Germany.

Phasing out coal continues to be a live political issue in Germany, although only the AfD supports reversing it entirely.

Some coal plants that had been due to close down were given a temporary stay of execution as a result of the energy crisis in 2022.

Despite widespread reporting of a “coal comeback”, however, coal-fired generation only increased temporarily – rising 9% from 2021 to 2022 – before dropping to 39% below pre-crisis levels in 2024.

Gas

Germany is heavily reliant on gas, particularly to fuel its industry and heat its buildings. In total, around a quarter of Germany’s energy supply comes from gas.

More than half of the gas consumed in Germany is used to generate heat for heavy industry, or in other industrial processes such as chemicals production. Most of the remaining consumption is for home heating and only around 15% is used to generate electricity.

Germany imports 95% of its gas, as it produces very little domestically. Prior to 2022, 55% of Germany’s gas was imported from Russia via three huge pipelines.

These links were the result of decades of “Ostpolitik” – a term used to describe the normalisation and improvement of relations between Germany and eastern Europe, including Russia, since the late 1960s. Pipeline gas from Russia was also relatively cheap.

More recently, Germany continued to support Russian pipeline expansion through the Nord Stream 2 project in the Baltic Sea, even as geopolitical relations between the two countries soured. At one point in 2019, then-chancellor Angela Merkel explicitly made the link between plans to phase out coal and the need to replace it with Russian gas.

Trianel gas power plant in Hamm, 2019. Credit: mauritius images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.

However, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the German government was forced to reevaluate its reliance on Russian gas. (At that time, Russia was also Germany’s main provider of oil and hard coal.)

Gas coming from Russia via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline stopped completely in August 2022. The German government had stated that it planned to phase out this gas, but, ultimately, Russia itself turned off the supply. Soon after, three of the four Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in mysterious circumstances.

Germany has scrambled to replace the missing gas, both by finding new suppliers and expanding its renewable capacity.

Norway has taken Russia’s place as the nation’s biggest gas supplier. Much of the replacement gas also comes from pipelines linked to Belgium and the Netherlands, which likely still includes Russian gas shipped to those countries as liquified natural gas (LNG).

Since 2022, Germany has also built its own LNG infrastructure for the first time, in order to receive shipments. These efforts have come under fire from NGOs and academics for “locking in” gas when the country needs to curb fossil fuel use to meet its climate targets.

Germany generated 16% of its electricity using gas in 2023 and its usage in this sector has not changed significantly in recent years.

However, gas power expansion has been framed as an essential component of Germany’s transition away from coal and nuclear power, to support a renewables-heavy grid.

This viewpoint was pushed within the SPD-Green-FDP coalition government by the FDP, in particular, but has also been supported by the CDU in opposition.

To this end, Germany has pursued the construction of new gas power plants.

However, plans to auction 5GW of new gas plants in early 2025 fell apart when the coalition government collapsed. These plants were intended to be “hydrogen-ready”, with the idea they would run on green hydrogen in the future, rather than gas.

Nuclear

Germany completed its nuclear phaseout in April 2023, shutting down its final three reactors.

This brought an end to what had been a major source of low-carbon power generation for the country, providing up to 30% of its electricity throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

In fact, at the height of nuclear power production in Germany in 2001, the nation generated 171TWh of electricity from its reactors. This meant it was the fourth biggest generator of nuclear energy in the world, ahead of Russia, according to Energy Institute data.

Yet Germany has a long history of opposition to nuclear power, beginning with protests in the 1970s and 1980s that successfully blocked the construction of some facilities.

This movement, which was linked to concerns about nuclear war, contributed to the formation of the German Green Party. Disasters at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the US and Chornobyl plant in Ukraine both fed into the negative response.

Demonstrations against the construction of a reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf, 1986. Credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo.

While anti-nuclear policies have been more popular among left-leaning political parties in Germany, they have also been supported by right-leaning parties at times.

An SPD-Green coalition government that took power in 1998 pledged to phase out nuclear power. They ultimately agreed on a timeline with electric utilities that would allow plants to continue operating for years, with a phaseout date of 2022.

When a coalition of the CDU and the FDP took over in 2009, they initially pushed to “phase out the phaseout” of nuclear power, framing it as a “bridging technology” while Germany expanded its renewable capacity.

However, there was a public backlash following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011. This contributed to the government, led by Merkel, deciding to change direction and accelerate the shutdown of nuclear reactors.

The transition away from nuclear power has been a key part of Germany’s “Energiewende” strategy. Merkel began using the term in this way after the Fukushima disaster.

(There are often suggestions that Germany could have decarbonised more effectively by maintaining nuclear power. However, in German politics the shutdown of nuclear facilities has been inextricably linked with renewable investment as part of the Energiewende.)

When a CDU-SPD coalition took over following the elections in 2013, the government committed to the 2022 phaseout date “at the latest”. This date was ultimately pushed back by a year due to the energy crisis in 2022.

Polling in recent years suggests that energy-security concerns have prompted many in Germany, especially those on the political right, to support a return to nuclear power.

This has been reflected in statements by the CDU and FDP – parties that have historically been more amenable to nuclear.

In its “new energy agenda”, released at the end of 2024, the CDU backed new nuclear technologies, such as small modular reactors. It also referred to closing down Germany’s final reactors in 2023 as an “ideologically motivated wrong decision”, despite being part of the government that committed to the phaseout.

Nevertheless, CDU leader Friedrich Merz has acknowledged that old reactors are unlikely to be restarted.

German utility companies have also stated that restarting shuttered reactors is “not economically viable”. The Association of German Engineers (VDI) has stressed that it expects renewables to be the “key driver of the energy transition”, rather than nuclear.

Transport

Germany is the birthplace of the modern car and remains one of the biggest automotive manufacturers in the world, home to companies such as BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler.

It is the second biggest producer of electric cars in the world, surpassed only by China. In 2024, the nation built 1.35m electric cars, around a third of total production, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.

When the SPD-Green-FDP coalition took over in 2021, it set a target of getting 15m electric cars onto German roads by 2030 – up from a previous target of 14m. (This goal initially only included battery-electric vehicles, but was later updated to include plug-in hybrids as well.)

The transport sector has been described as the “problem child” of Germany’s climate efforts.

Emissions from cars, vans and other forms of transport have not dropped significantly since the 1990s. As a result, the sector has repeatedly exceeded its emissions limits under Germany’s climate law.

Analysis by the German Environment Agency concluded that achieving the transport sector’s 2030 emissions target would require a shift towards rail travel and a reform of vehicle taxation to favour low-carbon transport.

The number of cars on German roads reached a record high of 49m at the start of 2024 and the number of cars per capita has increased over the past decade.

Electric car sales had been rapidly increasing in Germany since 2020, but this has faltered in recent years due to the government ending various subsidies.

Sales of plug-in hybrids roughly halved from a high of 362,093 in 2022 to 175,724 in 2023, according to Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) data. This dip, which also meant overall electric car sales fell, followed the phaseout of one subsidy programme.

In 2024, KBA announced that sales of pure battery-electric cars had dropped by around a quarter to 380,609, after peaking the previous year. A key driver of this slump was the government abruptly ending its “environmental bonus” subsidies for EVs at the end of 2023.

This was a consequence of the German supreme court ruling that had forced the government to cut billions of euros from its climate spending plans.

KBA and International Energy Agency (IEA) figures suggest there were around 3m battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars on the road by the start of 2025.

The recent pace of sales has prompted speculation that the government’s target of 15m EVs in Germany by 2030 may not be met, with analysis . (However, early EV sales data from 2025 showed a rapid increase from the previous year.)

The SPD-Green-FDP coalition government also set a target of one million electric vehicle (EV) charging stations by 2030.

However, usage of existing public charging points has remained relatively low. The energy industry association BDEW has stated that these stations require a faster rollout of electric vehicles to remain a viable business proposal.

Meanwhile, there has been mounting opposition in German politics to the EU target of phasing out new petrol and diesel car sales by 2035.

An alliance led by Germany secured a deal with the European Commission to water down the target by allowing cars that run on synthetic e-fuels to be exempt. This was pushed by the FDP, in particular. (Synthetic fuels are expected to be extremely expensive.)

Going into the 2025 election, Germany’s right-leaning and populist political parties called for the 2035 EU ban to be dropped altogether. The left-leaning SPD, while supporting the ban, affirmed that “Germany is a car country” and rejected the idea of fining carmakers that miss EU emissions targets.

Industry

Germany is a world leader in many industrial sectors, including vehicle manufacturing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In total, these industries produce around a quarter of the nation’s emissions.

In recent years, however, the nation has seen a slide in industrial production. Many companies in Germany have made mass layoffs and expressed interest in relocating.

There has been extensive commentary about Germany’s looming “deindustrialisation”, which has been attributed to competition from China, among other things. Many commentators have blamed German net-zero policies for this apparent decline.

Much of the recent pressure on German industry has resulted from high energy prices driven by the price of gas, which soared in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and its decision to restrict gas exports to Europe.

This has created an additional burden for energy-intensive industries such as chemicals and fertiliser production.

Some economists have pushed back against the deindustrialisation narrative. They argue that Germany’s industrial output remains relatively high and that, while some sectors are set to decline, they are likely to be offset by an increase in specialised manufacturing.

The Federation of German Industries (BDI) issued a report in 2024 concluding that, while Germany is “losing ground structurally as an industry location”, the way forward is to prioritise low-carbon industries, such as EV manufacturing.

(This is a similar conclusion to the one reached by former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi in his special review of EU competitiveness that year.)

Volkswagen workers assemble cars on the company’s assembly line in Wolfsburg, 2017. Credit: dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo.

BDI states that “fundamental global trends, such as the climate transformation, digitalisation and health”, are expected to generate global sales of more than €15tn a year by 2030.

Amid all this, the thinktank Agora Energiewende has highlighted the lack of “structural progress” in decarbonising Germany’s heavy industry. In an analysis of 2024 emissions, it notes that despite a “stagnating economy”, Germany’s industrial emissions rose that year.

The government has begun providing subsidies to companies to aid their decarbonisation, with €2.8bn handed to 15 industrial companies towards the end of 2024. This included five green hydrogen projects.

Hydrogen is viewed as essential for decarbonising high-emitting sectors, such as Germany’s steel industry, but there are also plans to use it throughout the economy – for example, in former gas-power plants.

Germany has set out an extensive hydrogen strategy, which includes a target of 10GW of green hydrogen – produced using renewable energy – by 2030. This is the most ambitious capacity target in Europe. (A report by the European Court of Auditors has called the EU’s goals for scaling up hydrogen production and imports “unrealistic”.)

The government expects 95-130TWh of hydrogen, and derivatives such as ammonia, will be required in 2030, with 30-50% of this made in Germany and the rest imported from other countries, such as Algeria.

Impacts and adaptation

Germany faces many risks as global temperatures rise, including more extreme flooding, heatwaves and drought.

Devastating floods that tore through western Germany in the summer of 2021, killing more than 200 people, were seen as a turning point for public understanding of climate change.

The heavy rainfall that triggered those floods was made up to nine times more likely by climate change, according to a study by World Weather Attribution. The floods were the nation’s costliest-ever extreme weather event, amounting to €33bn in damages, according to insurer Munich Re.

Another bout of extreme flooding that struck southern Germany in 2024 was also linked to rising temperatures. Environment minister Steffi Lemke described such floods as the nation’s “new reality”.

Flood damage in Schuld, Rheinland-Pfalz, 2021. Credit: Frank Schultze / Alamy Stock Photo.

Germany has also experienced record temperatures in recent years, with highs of more than 40C in 2019. In 2024, the German weather service DWD reported that, for the third consecutive year, it had been the nation’s hottest year on record.

Responding to the growing threat of heatwaves, including the Cerberus heatwave, health minister Karl Lauterbach announced Germany’s first federal heat protection plan in 2023.

The plan aimed to halve the number of heat-related deaths, after a study found that there had been more than 8,000 heat-related deaths during the summer of 2022.

Overall, a 2021 nationwide risk assessment conducted by the Federal Environment Agency identified 31 climate impacts with “a very urgent need for action”.

These include lower crop yields, increased risk of forest fires and heat-related threats to human health, particularly along the Rhine and Spree rivers where temperatures are highest. (Droughts have also repeatedly disrupted cargo vessels on the Rhine in recent years.)

Germany introduced its first-ever adaptation law, the Federal Climate Adaptation Act, in the summer of 2024. It requires federal and regional governments to present adaptation strategies, account for climate action in planning and report on climate-related adaptation costs and losses.

The federal government met this obligation by bringing forward a climate adaptation strategy towards the end of 2024, which includes 33 targets – mainly for the period out to 2030 – to prepare Germany for rising temperatures. This strategy was adopted in early 2025.

Notes

Graphic by Joe Goodman for Carbon Brief.

Data for energy consumption comes from Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy. Unlike earlier country profile infographics, exajoules (EJ) have been used instead of millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) as the unit of energy consumption.

Data for greenhouse gas emissions by sector and gas in the infographic is a combination of datasets.

The sectoral values for CO2 are from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) database. “Other sectors” includes agriculture, industrial processes, waste and the production, transformation and refining of fuels.

Values for methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are taken from a dataset published in Scientific Data by Dr Matthew Jones of the University of East Anglia, and collaborators. This dataset, in turn obtains these values from the PRIMAP database. The figures for these gases cover all sectors, including land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF). Values for F-gases are taken directly from the PRIMAP database.

The LULUCF label in the chart only covers CO2, which is by far the most significant greenhouse gas in this sector. These figures come from the Jones et al. dataset, which obtains them from the Global Carbon Project. Note that there is significant uncertainty around LULUCF emissions data, and other databases may have very different figures.

Per-capita emissions in 2023 are based on total emissions in the Jones et al. dataset, and therefore do not include the minor contribution of F-gases. Population data is from the World Bank.

The ranking of Germany as the 12th largest emitter in 2023 is also based on the Jones et al. dataset. It includes LULUCF emissions, and covers all greenhouse gases apart from F-gases.