UK emissions fell 3.9% last year but transport barely moved, official figures show

The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 3.9% in 2025 to the lowest level since the 1870s, final figures published on Tuesday by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero show, but almost none of the reduction came from transport, which the government’s own advisers say is now the biggest obstacle to the next carbon budget.

Total territorial emissions were 361m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, 54.1% below the 1990 baseline. Power stations cut their output of carbon by 14% as gas generation fell to a record low of 21% of electricity and offshore wind reached 32%. Industrial emissions fell 6%, helped by the closure of the last blast furnaces in England.

Surface transport, by contrast, emitted 97.8m tonnes, down just 0.7%, and remains the largest single sector at 27% of the total. Officials said growth in traffic, which rose 1.9% to a record 340bn vehicle miles, had almost entirely offset the effect of electric cars, which made up 29% of new sales but still only about 8% of the fleet. Emissions from vans rose for the fourth year running.

“The electricity story is now a success that other countries are studying,” said Dr Helen Castellane, chief analyst at the Climate Change Committee, the statutory adviser. “The transport story is one of a policy framework that has delivered cleaner cars but not fewer miles, and the sixth carbon budget assumes both.”

The sixth carbon budget, which runs from 2033 to 2037, requires emissions to be 78% below 1990. The committee’s central pathway assumes car traffic peaks by 2030. The Department for Transport’s most recent forecast, published in 2024, has it rising until 2050.

Buildings emissions, chiefly from gas heating, fell 2.5% in a mild winter. Agriculture was flat at 46m tonnes, with methane from cattle the dominant source. Aviation, which is counted separately under international rules, rose 4% to above its 2019 level for the first time.

The energy secretary said the figures showed the government’s clean power programme was “delivering at a pace the sceptics said was impossible” and that measures in the forthcoming transport decarbonisation plan, expected before Christmas, would address road traffic. A Treasury spokesperson declined to say whether the plan would include road pricing, which officials have examined as fuel duty revenue falls.

Environmental groups said the headline was flattering. Friends of the Earth pointed out that consumption-based emissions, which include goods made abroad, fell by only 1.1%. “Shutting a steelworks and buying the steel from Vietnam shows up in these figures as progress,” said its policy head, Ruth Oyelaran. “It is not.”