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Carbon dioxide emissions decline?
CARBON Dioxide emissions declined in 2015, according to a Global Carbon Project (GCP) report – and that was in spite of growth in the global economy.
Worldwide emissions from fossil fuels were projected by the GCP to decline by 0.6 percent this year, breaking the rapid emissions growth of the past decade.
“The major contributor to this change has been decreased coal consumption in China”, GCP executive director and co-author of the report CSIRO’s, Pep Canadell said. 
“After sustained emissions growth over the past decade, China’s emissions growth slowed to 1.2 percent in 2014 and is expected to decline by about 4 percent in 2015,” Dr Canadell said.
The GCP report showed Australia emitted over 1 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions from fossil fuels, emitting 0.38 billion tonnes, making it the 14th largest contributor globally. Australia’s per capita emissions remain high, the report noted, but had a strong declining trend over the past six years.
The largest emitter was China, with 9.7 billion tonnes, followed by US (5.6), the European Union (3.4) and India (2.6), together accounting for almost 60 perent of global emissions.
Dr Canadell said the strongest decline in emissions was in the European Union, averaging 2.4 percent decrease per year in the past decade, although some of it was achieved by transferring carbon emissions to emerging economies.
Lead author and Stanford University professor Rob Jackson said, “If India’s emissions continue under the current trend they will match the EU’s emissions before 2020.”
Dr Canadell said, “The largest uncertainty in future years is China’s coal use. 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.”
While renewable energy technology will play an increasingly important role in reducing fossil fuel emissions, the GCP report looks at future emissions pathways that could keep global average temperature increase below 2°C this century.
“Most scenarios exceed the carbon budget for a 2°C warming target in the first half of this century, which then requires up to several billion tonnes of emissions to be removed from the atmosphere each year during the second half of the century,” Dr Canadell said.
“Our analysis shows that the required large scale deployment of emissions reducing technology, like biomass energy with carbon capture and storage, will be limited by biophysical and socioeconomic constraints.
“This points to the need for higher ambition in decoupling economic growth from emissions growth if the two degree threshold were to be avoided.”
The GCP 2015 report had been underpinned by a full data and methods paper published in the journal Earth System Science Data, with two associated papers in the journal Nature Climate Change.
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