Rising transport and heating emissions slow Germany’s climate progress in 2025
An increase in emissions from heating and transport slowed Germany’s progress in becoming more climate-friendly last year, according to energy transition think tank Agora Energiewende. The country’s emissions only fell 1.5 percent or 9 million tonnes to 640 million tonnes, meaning the pace of reduction more than halved compared to 2024, Agora said in its annual review.
“Climate protection slowed last year,” said Julia Bläsius, who leads the think tank's Germany programme. She added that the slow transition to climate-friendly technologies in buildings and transport had a clear impact on the overall balance for the first time, as emissions in both sectors rose in 2025, according to Agora’s calculations, which also showed that Germany was off track to meet its 2030 climate targets. In past years, strong emissions reduction in the electricity sector compensated for lagging progress in transport and buildings.
According to the estimates, emissions in buildings rose by 3.2 percent compared with 2024 and transport emissions by 1.4 percent. But the think tank stressed that sales of electric cars and heat pumps were picking up, pointing to potential future emissions reductions.
Last year’s overall emissions decline was driven partly by lower output in energy-intensive industry amid prolonged weak demand and difficult global market conditions, and partly by record solar power generation, Bläsius said. She stressed the decline in industry emissions was “basically bad news”, as it was a result of economic weakness rather than progress in climate action.
The share of renewable energies in Germany’s gross electricity consumption in 2025 rose only by around one percentage point to 55.3 percent, according to the analysis. Slow wind speeds weighed on wind power production, but these losses were offset by strong solar power generation driven by the rapid spread of the technology and many hours of sunshine.
Agora’s calculations broadly confirmed an earlier analysis by research institute Fraunhofer ISE, which put the renewable share at 55.9 percent. However, Fraunhofer ISE focusses on the renewables share in the public grid, while Agora's data also includes industry facilities which generate electricity to be used on site.
Climate activists accuse government of undermining climate action
Environmentalists said Germany’s slowdown in emissions reduction increases pressure on the government to present credible climate action strategies for heating and transport in its highly anticipated Climate Action Programme, which is meant to put the country back on track to meeting climate targets and is due by March.
Greenpeace accused the government of slowing the transition in both sectors “with wrong promises about combustion engines and gas boilers that led people into fossil fuel price traps.” The government has promised to “abolish” existing policies directing the transition to climate-friendly heating, and also lobbied the EU to weaken the 2035 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
“With electric cars and heat pumps, the solutions have long been available and have recently been selling well,” Greenpeace said. “The federal government must strengthen this boom with its upcoming Climate Action Programme instead of weakening it.”
“We do not need a rollback of the combustion engine phase-out and heating law, but rather a build-on: measures for a sustainable transport and building sector must be expanded rather than scaled back,” said WWF Germany.
