Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change, will increase by one percent in 2022 and reach an all-time high, scientists said Friday at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt. Fueled by a continued recovery in aviation, emissions from oil are likely to rise by more than two percent compared with last year, while emissions from coal – some believe they peaked in 2014 – will hit a new record.
“Oil is more driven by the recovery from Covid and coal and gas are more driven by events in Ukraine,” Glen Peters, director of research at the CICERO climate research institute in Norway, told AFP. Global CO2 emissions from all sources – including deforestation and land use – will reach 40.6 billion tonnes, just below the record level in 2019, the first peer-reviewed projections for 2022 have shown.
Despite the wild cards of a pandemic recovery and an energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, the rise in carbon pollution from burning oil, gas and coal is in line with underlying trends, data suggest. And deeply troubling, said Peters, co-author of the study. “Emissions are now five percent higher than they were when the Paris Agreement was signed,” he noted in 2015. “You have to ask: When are they going to come down?”
Carbon Budget
The new figures show how terrifyingly difficult it will be to reduce emissions fast enough to meet the Paris target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Warming beyond that threshold, scientists warn, risks triggering dangerous tipping points in the climate system. Warming of barely 1.2°C so far has unleashed a crescendo of deadly and costly extreme weather, from heat waves and droughts to floods and tropical storms made even more destructive by rising sea levels.
To meet the ambitious Paris target, global greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 45 percent by 2030 and to net zero by mid-century, with any residual emissions offset by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To be on the path to a net-zero world, emissions would have to fall by seven percent per year over the next eight years.
To put that in perspective: in 2020, when much of the world economy was closed, emissions fell by only six percent. Over the longer term, the annual increase in CO2 from fossil fuel use has slowed to an average of 0.5 percent per year over the past decade, after rising by three percent annually from 2000 to 2010.
To have a 50/50 chance of staying below the 1.5C limit, humanity’s emission allowance is 380 billion tonnes of CO2, according to a study in Earth System Science Data by more than 100 scientists. At current emission trends of 40 billion tons per year, this “carbon budget” would be exhausted in less than a decade. With a two-thirds chance, the budget shrinks to a quarter and runs out in seven years.
In recent decades, scientists could usually draw a straight line between CO2 trends and the economy of China, which has been the world’s biggest carbon polluter for about 15 years. However, in 2022, China’s CO2 output is set to fall by almost one percent per year, almost certainly reflecting an economic slowdown linked to Beijing’s strict zero-covid policy.
Despite the need to seek alternative energy sources, including carbon-intensive coal, the European Union is on track to reduce its emissions by almost 0.8 percent. US emissions are likely to rise by 1.5 percent and India’s by six percent. The annual update also revealed that the ability of oceans, forests and land to continue absorbing more than half of CO2 emissions has slowed.
“These ‘dips’ are weaker than they would have been in the absence of the effects of a changing climate,” said co-author Corinne Le Quere, a professor at the University of East Anglia. Scientists who were not involved in the findings said they were grim. “The global carbon budget for 2022 is deeply depressed,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London. “To have any chance of staying below the internationally agreed global warming target of 1.5C, we need large annual reductions in emissions – of which there is no sign.”
