Carbon emissions fell a record 7 percent in 2020 as countries imposed lockdowns and restrictions on movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Carbon Project said in its annual assessment yesterday.
The decline of an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes is considerably larger than previous annual record declines, such as 0.9 billion tonnes at the end of World War II or 0.5 billion tonnes in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis.
The international team of researchers behind the report said that emissions from fossil fuels and industry would be about 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent this year — still a significant chunk of Earth’s remaining “carbon budget.”
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Emission reductions were most pronounced in the US (down 12 percent) and the EU (down 11 percent), the Global Carbon Project said.
In China, emissions this year would likely fall just 1.7 percent, as Beijing superpowered its economic recovery, it said.
By sector, emissions from transport accounted for the largest share of the global decrease, with emissions from vehicle journeys falling by about half at the peak of the first COVID-19 wave in April.
By this month, emissions from road transport had fallen 10 percent year-on-year and emissions from aviation were down 40 percent.
Emissions from industry — 22 percent of the global total — were down 30 percent in some countries with the strongest lockdown measures.
Philippe Ciais, a researcher at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences, said that without the pandemic, it is likely that the carbon footprint of big emitters such as China would have continued to grow this year.
“It’s a temporary respite,” he told reporters over videoconferencing. “The way to mitigate climate change is not to stop activity, but rather to speed up the transition to low-carbon energy.”
This year’s emission decline has not translated into a reduction in the levels of carbon pollution in Earth’s atmosphere, Ciais said.
Apart from this year, emissions have grown each year since the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, and the UN says that they must fall 7.6 percent annually by 2030 to reach the more ambitious Paris temperature cap of 1.5°C.
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