If it is indeed a decrease, however, study authors said this would be the first time global carbon dioxide emissions have dropped, even if only slightly, while the world economy grows.
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The world’s carbon emissions from fossil fuels could decline this year for the first time during a period of strong economic growth, new research shows.
Because plants need carbon dioxide to grow, scientists have expected rising atmospheric CO2 to substantially enhance plant growth, offsetting a portion of human CO2 emissions and, in turn, slowing climate change.
Professor Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at UEA who led the data analysis, said: “These figures are certainly not typical of the growth trajectory seen since 2000 – where the annual growth in emissions was between 2 and 3%”. “This year we expect total emissions to flatten or drop slightly, despite strong growth in gross domestic product worldwide”.
“After sustained emissions growth over the past decade, China’s emissions growth slowed to 1.2 % in 2014 and is expected to decline by about four percent in 2015”.
“China is now the world’s largest user of wind energy, and will soon surpass Germany as the largest developer of solar”, he said.
In a separate paper published today in Nature Climate Change, we look in more detail at the possibility of reaching global peak emissions.
Researchers believes, however, that carbon emissions will have to reach zero in order to achieve climate stabilization.
For the past decade, an average increase of 2.4 percent each year had been observed in the emissions, to which 90 percent is caused by the use of fossil fuels.
And this decoupling wasn’t due to weird weather or accountancy ploys – much of the decline in emissions is due to a reduction in China’s coal consumption as its economy slows and it moves to cleaner, renewable energy sources in an effort to deal with its epic air pollution problem, the researcher said. As a result, the change could range from a slight increase of 0.5 percent to a decrease of as much as 1.6 percent.
“The largest uncertainty in future years is China’s coal use”. China’s emissions are likely to rise again, but the Chinese government has pledged to hit the peak by 2030.
Yet the current emissions path is not consistent with stabilising the climate at a level below 2℃ global warming. “I don’t think you can assume any longer that a growth in GDP assumes a growth in energy consumption”, he said. However, he said the report would not be a major factor in negotiations.
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According to Le Quere, basic energy needs of developing economies still rely primarily on coal where these emissions will decrease modestly for industrial nations at best.
