Global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to stall and possibly fall in 2015, researchers said on Monday, noting that it would be the first time such a decline has occurred during global economic growth. “Stabilisation, or reduction, in China’s coal use might be sustainable since more than half of the growth in the country’s energy consumption came from non-fossil fuel energy sources in 2014 and 2015”, Canadell said.
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Climate scientist Corinne Le Quere from the University of East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, says there’s one main reason for the good news: “It’s mostly down to China’s use of coal”, she says.
Dr Canadell said this would be a wake-up call for Australia’s mining industry, which has relied on coal exports to China to fuel the country’s energy needs.
“Reaching zero emissions will require long-term commitments from countries attending the climate meeting in Paris this week and beyond”, Professor Jackson said. Their central projection is a decline of 0.6 percent.
Online – Despite global economic growth in 2015, worldwide emissions from fossil fuels are projected to decline by 0.6% this year. This is the first two-year period in a multi-decade record where the global economy shows clear signs of decoupling from fossil fuel emissions.
The report from the Global Carbon Project led by a Stanford University researcher identified China as the world’s top carbon dioxide emitter in 2014.
In what could lift the mood of negotiators at the Paris climate summit, scientists have found that carbon emissions are set to decline this year.
European ministers, including the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd, have warned that all countries will need to compromise to secure a deal as the conference enters what some are describing as the “sharp end” of the talks. India’s reliance on coal has been increasing steadily for the past five years, the report said.
“We’re not trying to suggest that this is the global peak for emissions”. Despite the slowing of Carbon dioxide emissions globally, the research highlights that the amount of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has now reached 400 parts per million, its highest level in at least 800,000 years.
The news comes as nations meet at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris to hammer out a deal to reduce emissions.
NEW research shows the global effort to slash carbon emissions is finally seeing some reward. But past year production slowed to just 0.6% and that downward trend has continue into 2015, according to figures published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“Current Earth system models assume that global plant growth will provide the tremendous benefit of offsetting a significant portion of humanity’s Carbon dioxide emissions, thus buying us much needed time to curb emissions”, said William Kolby Smith, one of the researchers, in a news release. “There is still a long way to near zero emissions”. The environmental and economic costs of these technologies, such as the direct-air capture of CO2, need to be addressed before they are widely deployed, the authors wrote.
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But what makes the last couple of years most “unusual”, they say, is that emissions are declining while the global economy is actually growing. The developed world has been transparent but it was only a few years ago that China admitted to under-counting its own emissions, telling a different tale than the pollution clouds that wafted into other countries did. “We expect the power sector coal and gas demand to be below the forecasts made by BP, Exxon, Statoil, Shell, Gazprom and the IEA”, the report said.
