India fourth biggest emitter of Carbon dioxide in 2014

Graph showing the annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industrial processes since 1990.

What happens in China, which produces a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, is key. “We saw slower global growth in petroleum in 2014 and faster growth in renewables”, said Stanford’s Prof.

“Only a year ago people were assuming that economic growth and emissions growth were as inextricably coupled as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin”, he said.

Past emissions declines have usually been linked to economic distress, such as the global financial panic of 2009 and the Russian economic meltdown of the late 1990s. But this time, it would be the first decline during a period of strong global economic growth.

Meanwhile, Australia’s emissions make up over 1 percent of the world’s total, making it the 14th largest contributor to carbon emissions, while China, the United States, India and the European Union continue to make up the majority, with 60 percent.

“Whether 2015 is the year we truly turn the corner on global emissions or is just a blip in the upward march towards risky climate change now depends on Paris”.

“Reaching zero emissions will require long-term commitments from countries attending the climate meeting in Paris this week and beyond”, Jackson added.

Prof Le Quere told the BBC: “To deal with climate change we need emissions to go to zero – and we are now talking about zero growth and not zero emissions – so we are still a long, long way from that”.

“The trend of rapid global emissions growth has been broken”, said Michael Grubb at University College London. The world’s biggest carbon emitter plans to upgrade coal power plants over the next five years to tackle the problem and says its emissions will peak by around 2030 before starting to decline. “All we need is a strong agreement”. Remember, China was responsible for some 80 percent of the growth in global demand since 2000 – but it has completely reversed its strategy of coal-intensive growth, as we’ve been reporting since last November. As a result, the change could range from a slight increase of 0.5 percent to a decrease of as much as 1.6 percent.

For the past decade, an average increase of 2.4 percent each year had been observed in the emissions, to which 90 percent is caused by the use of fossil fuels. As economies surge they usually use more energy, Jackson says, which means they put out more CO2.

But while the unexpected fall in emissions was good news at the start of a second week of climate talks in Paris, the report warns the fall may only be temporary and that the switch away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy needs to be accelerated if catastrophic climate change is to be averted. “Underlying trends in some emerging and established economies suggest that structural changes in their economies and energy systems are already leading to emissions reductions”.

“Large parts of the world are embarking on industrialization a decade or more behind China and are using the same coal-based industrialization that China followed”, Socolow said.

“Emissions in India are at the same level as China in the 1990s”, said Glen P. Peters, an analyst with a climate center in Oslo who spoke at a news conference here.