BRUSSELS — The European Union’s leaders will arrive at a global climate summit next week with a vague promise to soon deliver a new emissions-cutting target after ministers struck a face-saving deal Thursday evening.

The United Nations has called on world leaders to present their climate plans for 2035, a requirement under the 2015 Paris Agreement, at a meeting in New York next Wednesday.

But EU governments have struggled to find the consensus required to agree on the plan, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC) in U.N. jargon. Earlier this week they acknowledged they would miss the end-September deadline for the new targets. 

To avoid showing up empty-handed in New York, countries resorted to drafting a “statement of intent.” 

After lengthy negotiations, the bloc’s 27 environment ministers on Thursday agreed on a two-page missive to the U.N. promising to deliver an NDC before the COP30 climate summit begins in November. The target will fall between 66.25 percent and 72.5 percent of a 1990 baseline level of CO2 emissions.

The European Commission and Denmark, which currently leads negotiations among EU governments, hailed the agreement as a show of unity. 

“The EU is and will remain a global climate leader,” said Danish Climate Minister Lars Aagaard. EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra insisted that Thursday’s agreement “allows us to confidently walk into New York next week.” 

Not everyone saw it that way. “The EU environment ministers’ statement of intent shows weakness and indecision at a time when Europeans need courage and clarity from our leaders,” Mary Robinson, the former Irish president and member of the Elders group of former world leaders, said in a statement.

Thursday’s hard-fought agreement also only kicks the can down the road for a few weeks until ministers meet again to agree on the formal NDC. The drawn-out negotiations — which resulted in minimal tweaks to the statement — signal difficult talks ahead. 

Long-term trouble

The battle over the EU’s NDC is closely linked to the bloc’s overarching climate target for 2040, proposed by the Commission in July. Discussion on that target was put on hold after France and Germany joined Poland, Italy and a handful of other countries to form a blocking minority and postponed the discussion until national leaders meet in late October.

The postponement also derailed the planned approval of the 2035 goal, as the Commission and Denmark had planned for the NDC figure to be derived from the new 2040 target. 

The statement of intent agreed Thursday is intended as a face-saving compromise that will allow EU leaders to arrive at next week’s New York meeting with something to present. The U.N. has set up the meeting specifically for leaders to announce new targets, and the EU’s leaders were not included on a provisional list published before Thursday’s agreement.

To deliver a 2035 plan ahead of the November climate conference, the EU’s 27 national governments will now have to decide whether to aim for a hard target or the wide range included in the statement of intent. 

Several governments skeptical of the 2040 legislation, such as Slovakia, are opposed to the higher end of the range, as it refers to the halfway point between the EU’s existing 2030 goal and the proposed new target. Countries favoring a more ambitious plan — such as Spain and Germany — considered the lower bound of the target range unacceptably weak. 

Hoekstra on Thursday indicated that he would be comfortable with either a specific figure or a range as the formal target. 

“I’m not religious about [either] of the two. I think the two could work,” he said. “What we will push for is something that is truly ambitious.”

Aagaard said Denmark would organize an ad-hoc summit to approve the 2035 plan after the leaders have had their say.