Bavaria officially scraps 2040 climate neutrality target

Bavaria is officially abandoning its 2040 climate neutrality target, citing the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Germany’s nuclear phase-out as factors that government lawmakers say have made the goal unworkable, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported. The change was agreed by the state’s coalition government, which holds a comfortable majority in the state’s parliament, making the necessary approval a formality. 

The southern state will now align with the federal government’s 2045 climate neutrality target. Bavaria’s environment minister Thorsten Glauber, a member of the conservative regional Free Voters party, described the revised goal as more “feasible” and “honest”. 

Bavaria’s state premier Markus Söder, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, had committed to the 2040 target in July 2021, in the wake of devastating floods that destroyed villages and killed more than 100 people in the Ahr Valley. He said at the time that the world was on the “threshold of epochal changes”.

Opposition lawmakers were swift to criticise the reversal. Green Party state parliamentary group leader Katharina Schulze said Bavaria had “achieved absolutely nothing” in tackling emissions-intensive sectors such as transport and heating. Social Democrat environment politician Harry Scheuenstuhl pointed to just three new wind turbines added in the state this year as evidence of government failure on climate policy. Regensburg university climate expert Michael Sterner told Süddeutsche Zeitung that policymakers should be speeding up renewable energy deployment in response to Russia’s “fossil wars” and Middle East conflicts.

Despite his coalition’s decision to scrap the target, Glauber warned that failing to act on climate change would ultimately prove more costly than reducing emissions now, given rising damage and adaptation costs from extreme weather. 

Bavaria had signalled its intention to delay the target as far back as November 2025. In Germany’s federal system, the states have limited authority when it comes to climate and energy legislation. However, they can for example introduce legislation that specifies or tightens energy efficiency rules, or set stricter targets. Voters in Hamburg – one of Germany’s 16 federal states and its second-largest city, in October approved a referendum requiring the city to reach climate neutrality by 2040 — five years earlier than the federal target.