Reacción a "Reactions to the results of the Global Carbon Budget 2022 report"

The Global Carbon Project's annual carbon balance is a valuable source of information for analysing and assessing the efforts being made to limit the growing emissions of CO₂, the main greenhouse gas responsible for today's human-induced climate change. This report clearly shows how insufficient efforts have been made so far to limit emissions and increase CO₂ sinks. This annual assessment should be read and interpreted in conjunction with the IPCC's estimates of the global emission reductions needed to stay within the dangerous warming limits for the climate system, which the Paris Agreement sets at 2ºC and preferably 1.5ºC.

The scale of emissions reductions needed to stay within the critical 1.5°C limit would be at a rate of approximately 1.4 billion tonnes of CO₂ (GtCO₂) per year until 2050. This reduction would be equivalent to the reduction that occurred in 2020 as a result of the measures taken to combat covid-19, but maintained every year between now and 2050. However, the data confirm that far from reducing emissions, they continue to increase globally to reach 40.6 GtCO₂ in 2022, with approximately 90% coming from the burning of fossil fuels and 10% from land use change (mainly deforestation). At the current rate of growth in emissions, warming of 1.5°C would be reached with a 50% probability in nine years. 

There is a marked difference between countries in terms of emissions in 2022. While emissions from fossil fuels fall in the European Union (largely forced by restrictions on natural gas supply) and China (due to continued confinement and its consequences on economic activity), they rise in the US, India and the rest of the world. These negative figures are partly offset by the fact that emissions from fossil fuels are at least not growing as fast today as in the 2000s. In contrast, emissions from land-use change show a stabilising trend over the last two decades, with Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo being the main emitters. Combined emissions from fossil fuel burning and land-use change, while not declining as they should, have remained roughly constant since 2015, which is moderately encouraging news.  

All these data show that we are a long way from meeting the emissions reduction pathway that would prevent us from exceeding the critical global warming limit of 1.5ºC. In addition to the CO₂ balance described in this report, it should be complemented with data on the rest of the greenhouse gases that also contribute, albeit to a lesser extent, to current climate change.