Nicola Sturgeon has been urged to abandon her plans to cut aviation taxes in Scotland in an attempt to help meet a challenging new target to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2045.

The Scottish first minister said on Sunday that she accepted the world faces a climate emergency, but her aides said the government was still planning to cut air passenger duty (APD) to increase flight numbers from Scotland’s airports.

The Committee on Climate Change told Sturgeon on Thursday that Scotland should aim to reduce its emissions to net zero five years earlier than the UK as a whole. Her government’s current target is to cut Scotland’s emissions by 90% by 2050.

The CCC said Scotland’s capacity to plant large new forests to soak up CO 2 and to capture and store it from energy-intensive industries or oil refineries in redundant North Sea oilfields gave it a clear advantage over other parts of the UK.

Sturgeon pledged on Sunday to adopt the committee’s recommendations, but Chris Stark, its chief executive, said meeting that target would be far harder if the Scottish government increased emissions from air travel by reducing APD. The Scottish Green party has said cutting duty rates by 50% in Scotland would increase CO 2 emissions by 60,000 tonnes.

Asked whether Sturgeon should drop those plans, Stark said: “It would help immensely with the emissions challenge there is in Scotland.” Raising aviation emissions would increase the pressure on other Scottish industries to cut their emissions to meet the net zero target by 2045.

Roseanna Cunningham, the Scottish environment secretary, said her government had accepted the 2045 target, but did not offer any specific details on how it would be achieved. A government spokeswoman said they would consider the question of abandoning cuts to the aviation tax if Stark’s committee officially asked them to.

Urging the UK government to accept the committee’s 2050 net zero target for the UK as a whole, she said: “We can, and we must, end our contribution to climate change. I invite everyone to accept the advice we’ve received and work with us in a just and fair transition to a net-zero economy.”

On the aviation tax, the spokeswoman said Scottish ministers already included emissions from international aviation in Scotland’s figures – a step the UK government had yet to take.

Helped by the removal of its coal-fired power stations and concerted promotion of onshore wind farms, Scotland has already cut emissions far more deeply than the UK as a whole, by 49% since 1990. Unlike the UK government, it has legally binding annual targets that it is due to strengthen in a new climate bill in the Scottish parliament.

Stark said the Scottish government needed to be far more ambitious, increasing spending dramatically in a number of areas, as well as properly implementing policies it had already announced.

Ministers had to make carbon capture and storage an economic priority, deliver on promises to improve home energy efficiency, dramatically increase funding for electric vehicles, and prepare for a quadrupling in demand for wind farms and other renewable power stations. It also needed to work with the UK government on replacing the UK-wide gas grid.

Sturgeon has said Scotland should phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2032, eight years earlier than the UK. But takeup of ultra-low emission vehicles in Scotland is still slower than in England: it has only 5.6% of the UK’s Ulevs, but 8% of the UK’s population. Stark said Scottish ministers needed to invest far more heavily in electrical vehicle infrastructure.