COVID DRIVES RECORD EMISSIONS DROP IN 2020
Climate change: Covid drives record emissions drop in 2020
The global response to the Covid-19 pandemic has driven the biggest annual fall in CO2 emissions since World War Two, say researchers.
Their study indicates that emissions have declined by around 7% this year.
France and the UK saw the greatest falls, mainly due to severe shutdowns in response to a second wave of infections.
China, by contrast, has seen such a large rebound from coronavirus that overall emissions may grow this year.
- Global ‘elite’ must curb high-carbon living
- Have countries kept their climate change promises?
- Beer and crisps used to help tackle climate change
The decline in carbon in 2020 has dwarfed all the previous big falls.
According to the Global Carbon Project team, this year saw carbon emissions decline by 2.4 billion tonnes.
In contrast, the fall recorded in 2009 during the global economic recession was just half a billion tonnes, while the ending of World War Two saw emissions fall by under one billion tonnes.
Across Europe and the US, the drop was around 12% over the year, but some individual countries declined by more.
France saw a fall of 15% and the UK went down by 13%, according to one analysis.
“The main reason is that these two countries had two waves of confinement that were really quite severe compared with other countries,” said Prof Corinne Le Quéré, from the University of East Anglia, UK, who contributed to the study.
“The UK and France have a lot of their emissions come from the transport sector and generally have a bit less coming from industry and other sectors.
“This is even more true in France, because so much of their electricity production is from nuclear energy, so 40% of their emissions are from the transport sector.”
Aviation around the world has been badly hit by restrictions and by the end of this year, it’s expected that emissions from this sector will still be 40% below 2019 levels.
One country that may have bucked the trend is China.
Overall, the research team estimates that the country will experience a fall in emissions of 1.7% this year but some analysis suggests that the country has already rebounded enough from Covid-19 that the overall carbon output may have increased.
“All our datasets show that China experienced a big drop in emissions in February and March, but the datasets differ in the level of emissions towards the end of 2020,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at CICERO, who was involved in the study.
“In late 2020, China is at least close to having the same level of daily emissions as in 2019, and indeed some of our estimates suggest Chinese emissions may have actually increased for the year as a whole in 2020 relative to 2019, despite the pandemic,” he added.
Researchers believe that dramatic drop experienced through the pandemic response might be hiding a longer term fall-off in carbon, more related to climate policies.
