The Global Carbon Budget report, released on Friday during the United Nations COP27 climate summit, revealed the gap between the promises governments, companies and investors have made to reduce global warming emissions the coming years and their actions. Oil emissions, fueled by a recovery in aviation following the COVID-19 pandemic, are likely to rise more than two percent compared to last year, while coal emissions – believed by some to have peaked in 2014 – will new record. “Oil is driven more by the recovery from COVID and coal and gas are driven more by events in Ukraine,” Glenn Peters, director of research at climate research institute CICERO in Norway, told AFP. Global CO2 emissions from all sources, including deforestation, will reach 40.6 billion tonnes, just below the record level in 2019, according to a report by more than 100 scientists. About 90 percent of this is the result of burning fossil fuels. The data suggest the rise is consistent with underlying trends and is deeply troubling, said Peters, a co-author of the study. “Emissions are now five percent above what they were when the Paris Agreement was signed” in 2015, he noted. “You have to ask: When are they going to go down?” Aviation has rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the industry saying passenger traffic reached 74% of pre-pandemic levels in September [File: Roslan Rahman/AFP] The new figures show how dauntingly difficult it will be to reduce emissions fast enough to meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Warming beyond this threshold, scientists warn, risks triggering dangerous tipping points in the climate system. Just 1.2 degrees Celsius (34.2 F) so far has caused more extreme weather, with heat waves, droughts, floods and tropical storms made more destructive by rising seas. The report showed that emissions this year are set to rise by 1.5 percent in the United States and 6 percent in India, the world’s second and third largest emitters, respectively. CO2 output from China, the world’s biggest polluter, is likely to fall by 0.9 percent as a result of Beijing’s zero-covid-19 strategy, which has limited economic growth. And while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a scramble for alternative energy sources, including coal-intensive coal, European emissions have also fallen slightly.
“Deeply depressing”
To meet the Paris target, global greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 45 percent by 2030 and zero by mid-century, with any residual emissions offset by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To be on track for a net zero world, emissions would need to be reduced by seven percent annually over the next eight years. Even in 2020, when much of the world was in lockdown due to the pandemic, emissions only fell by six percent. New Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world with thick smog blanketing the city earlier this month [Adnan Abidi/Reuters] 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 ‘sinks’ are weaker than they would be without 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 profoundly depressing,” Mark Maslin, a professor of climatology at University College London, told AFP. “To have any chance of staying below the internationally agreed global warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to have big annual cuts in emissions – something there is no indication of.”
