Carbon dioxide emissions down 7% in pandemic
A locked-down pandemic-struck world cut its carbon dioxide emissions this year by 7 percent, the biggest drop ever, new preliminary figures show.
The Global Carbon Project, an authoritative group of dozens of international scientists who track emissions, calculated that the world will have put 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the air in 2020. That’s down from 40.1 billion tons in 2019, according a study published Thursday in the journal Earth System Science Data.
Scientists say this drop is chiefly because people are staying home, traveling less by car and plane, and that emissions are expected to jump after the pandemic ends. Ground transportation makes up about onefifth of emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief humanmade heat-trapping gas.
“Of course, lockdown is absolutely not the way to tackle climate change,” said study co-author Corinne LeQuere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.
The same group of scientists months ago predicted emission drops of 4 percent to 7 percent, depending on the progression of COVID-19. A second coronavirus wave and continued travel reductions pushed the decrease to 7 percent, LeQuere said.
Emissionsdropped12 percent in the United States and 11 percent in Europe, but only1.7percent in China. That’s because China had an earlier lockdown with less of a second wave. Also China’s emissions are more industrial than other countries and its industrywas less affected than transportation, LeQuere said.
The calculations — based
on reports detailing energy use, industrial production and daily mobility counts — were praised as accurate by outside scientists.
Even with the drop in
2020, the world on average put1,185 tons of carbon dioxide into the air every second.
Final figures for 2019 published in the same study show that from 2018 to 2019
emissions of the main human-made heat-trapping gas increased only 0.1 percent, much smaller than annual jumps of around 3 percent a decade or two ago.
Even with emissions expected to rise after the pandemic, scientists are wondering if 2019 might be the peak of carbon pollution, LeQuere said.
“We are certainly very close to an emissions peak, if we can keep the global community together,” said Achim Steiner, development director at the United Nations.
Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, thinks emissions will increase after the pandemic but said he’s “optimistic that we have, as a society, learned some lessons that may help decrease emissions in the future.”
“For example,” he added, “as people get good at telecommuting a couple of days a week or realize they don’t need quite somany business trips, we might see behaviorfuture emissions decreases.”