Carbon Emissions Expected To Stall Or Decline In 2015, Report Says

“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”, he said.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there was indeed a drop in coal consumption in 2014 by coal based industries in China among steel, cement, and fertilizer factories, resulting in overall coal production dropping dramatically. While emissions in the United States and the European Union dropped this year, the real reason global carbon output is down is because of China ” s sweeping cuts in coal use. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere can dictate climate change and these will grow continuously when emissions are positive.

The report covering the period when the industrial world’s economies are growing came from the Global Carbon Project, an worldwide organization of experts that has monitored the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide since 2001. In India, for example, carbon emissions increased by a noticeable 7.8 percent in 2014. China’s emissions are likely to rise again, but the Chinese government has pledged to hit the peak by 2030. India’s reliance on coal has been increasing steadily for the past five years, the report said.

“Global emissions need to decrease to near zero to achieve climate stabilisation”. India, the third-largest polluter, hasn’t even named a year for emissions to peak.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord tried to remedy this with developed countries pledging to mobilize $100 billion per year of new aid by 2020 – although funding at this scale is proving to be hard.

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. Financial mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund have been established to help invest in renewable energy and more sustainable infrastructure in the developing world, but this may not be enough.

Globally, it is unlikely that emissions have peaked for good because many growing economies still rely on coal for energy generation and emissions reductions in some industrialized countries are still very modest, the study said. On particular issue is whether the OECD will be willing to “finance the transition to a carbon-free society for the rest of the world”.