For scientists, this year is the “real test” to see if the world has bent the curve. After a historic drop in 2020, linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a strong rebound in 2021, global CO2 emissions2 eventually remain at record highs in 2022. They show no signs of decreasing “necessary and urgent” to limit global warming to 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era, the most ambitious objective of the Paris agreement. At this rate, there is now a 50% chance of exceeding this threshold within nine years.
These are the conclusions of the latest assessment of the Global Carbon Project, a consortium of more than 100 scientists from 80 international laboratories working on the carbon cycle. Their results are published in the journal Earth System Science Data, Friday November 11, as well as in an interactive atlas. They constitute a new alert for the leaders gathered at the world conference on climate (COP27), in Sharm El-Sheikh, in Egypt.
This study predicts that global emissions of CO2 − the main greenhouse gas and leading cause of climate change − will reach 40.6 billion tonnes in 2022, approaching the 2019 record, and up by almost 1% compared to 2021. Most of it comes from the combustion of fossil fuels and cement factories, whose emissions are expected to represent 36.6 billion tonnes this year, up 1% compared to 2021. These emissions had collapsed by 5.4% in 2020, before growing by 5.1% in 2021. The rest of the emissions are linked to changes in land use, in particular deforestation; they seem to have remained stable this year.
China remains the largest emitter
In total, the very high levels of emissions “remain broadly stable since 2015”notes Pierre Friedlingstein, research director at the CNRS, the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the University of Exeter (United Kingdom), and first author of the study. “We are no longer on a trajectory of strong growth each year, but we are still very far from the mark. »
« This report is bad news. It was very naive to think that the green investments of the recovery plans were going to keep emissions down”, reacts Philippe Ciais, director of research (CEA) at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and one of the authors of the study. The extrapolations made by the study – since the year is not over – should however be taken with caution, being more uncertain than in previous assessments. “We have gone from a world where we could predict emissions thanks to numerous indicators to a chaotic world, shaken by multiple crises and the war in Ukraine, where everything can change”he recalls.
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