Carbon dioxide emissions could fall by the largest amount since World War II this year as the COVID-19 pandemic brings economies to a virtual standstill, according to the chair of a network of scientists providing benchmark emissions data.
Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, which produces annual emissions estimates, said that carbon output could fall by more than 5 percent year-on-year — the first dip since a 1.4 percent reduction after the 2008 financial crisis.
“I wouldn’t be shocked to see a 5 percent or more drop in carbon dioxide emissions this year, something not seen since the end of World War II,” said Jackson, who is a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University in California.
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“Neither the fall of the Soviet Union nor the various oil or savings and loan crises of the past 50 years are likely to have affected emissions the way this crisis is,” he said in an e-mail.
The prediction — among a range of new forecasts being produced by climate researchers — represents a tiny sliver of good news in the middle of the pandemic: Climate scientists had warned world governments that global emissions must start dropping by this year to avoid the worst predictions of climate change.
However, the improvements are for all the wrong reasons, tied to a global health emergency that has shuttered factories, grounded airlines and forced hundreds of millions of people to stay at home to slow the contagion.
Experts warn that without structural change, the declines could be short-lived and have little effect on the concentrations of carbon dioxide that have accumulated in the atmosphere over decades.
“This drop is not due to structural changes, so as soon as confinement ends, I expect the emissions will go back close to where they were,” said Corinne le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in eastern England.
After world greenhouse gas emissions dipped in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, they shot back up 5.1 percent in the recovery, Jackson said.
The pattern of a swift rebound has already begun to play out in China, where emissions fell by an estimated 25 percent as the country closed factories and put in place strict measures on people’s movement to contain the novel coronavirus, but have since returned to a normal range.
That kind of resilience underscores the magnitude of the economic transformation that would be needed to meet the goals of an international deal brokered in Paris in 2015 to try to avert the most catastrophic climate change scenarios.
“Our estimates indicate that the pandemic’s climate silver lining is vanishingly thin,” said Seaver Wang, a climate and energy analyst at the institute. “It’s as if we went back in time and emitted the same amount we were a few years ago — which was already too much. In the grand scheme of things, it really makes no difference.”
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