Glabal Carbon Emissions Slow Down, Report Reveals

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. Specifically, the researchers are predicting that not only might the growth of Carbon dioxide emissions slow or stall this year, but that there might even be a chance emissions growth would decline by 0.6% in 2015.

David Runnalls, a senior fellow with Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation, said leaders in India are smart enough to avoid getting trapped in the same “coal mess” that led China to become the world’s largest emitter of Carbon dioxide with 27 per cent of global emissions.

Since 2000, global emissions have risen at an average annual pace of 2.4 percent, as countries such as India and China increase their reliance on coal and fossil fuels to boost growth.

Canadell said that despite global economic growth in 2015, worldwide emission from fossil fuels is expected to decline by 0.6 percent, the first decline since the global financial crisis in 2008. Data showed that China’s emissions rate slowed to 1.2 per cent in 2014 as the country moves to other sources like hydro, nuclear, wind and solar power.

Jackson and an international team used data from the Global Carbon Project, which tracks worldwide CO2 emissions, to come up with their result.

“There are more than $500 billion today”, which he said provides an incentive to continue producing emissions that scientists say are warming the planet. In the past, every single break or decline in the growth of carbon emissions was directly correlated with a downturn in the global or regional economy. According to Dr. Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, while there was an increase of 3 percent in the economic growth, there was a corresponding 0.5 percent drop in the greenhouse gas emissions. China’s emissions are likely to rise again, but the Chinese government has pledged to hit the peak by 2030.

The “surprising” findings were published as 195 nations entered the final phase of UN talks in Paris for an accord to roll back heat-trapping carbon emissions, blamed for unsafe climate change.

Unlike past periods with little or no emissions growth, global gross domestic product (GDP) grew substantially in both years.

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.

And emissions from land-use change, albeit with large uncertainties and high emissions from Indonesian fires this year, have been on a declining trend for over a decade.

In this latest study, the researchers looked at plant growth over time and compared it to Carbon dioxide emissions.

Achieving climate stabilisation will require reducing emissions to near zero, researchers said. “Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the earth is warming”, said Hoesung Lee, the 69-year-old South Korean economics professor named chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October.