Global carbon emissions will rebound in 2021 after an unprecedented fall in 2020 due to the pandemic, potentially putting the world out of reach of overall climate goals, the International Energy Agency says.
The next decade is a make-or-break moment for governments to address rising emissions, the IEA says in its latest World Energy Outlook released Tuesday. How aggressively governments promote shifts to cleaner energy will essentially determine whether or not the world has a chance of limiting warming temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the more ambitious of the Paris climate agreement’s targets, the report says.
And despite the pandemic driving emissions down, current policies, both in the United States and abroad, aren’t robust enough to bring about a “decisive downward turn” in emissions, the IEA finds.
Emissions fell 7% in 2020 amid coronavirus lockdowns, but they are likely to rebound in 2021, the IEA says. By 2027, without any changes to current policies, emissions will already be higher than pre-pandemic levels and will continue to rise.
In addition, the pandemic hasn’t had the same downward effect on emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is dozens of times more potent than carbon dioxide, even as oil and gas production has declined, the IEA says.
Emissions don’t bounce back quite as quickly in a scenario in which the world takes longer to recover from the pandemic, but “a weaker economy also drains momentum” from switching to cleaner energy, the IEA adds.
“A delayed economic recovery results in slower emissions growth, but it is not an answer to climate change,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, in a foreword for the outlook. “Our analysis makes clear that the somewhat lower emissions come for all the wrong reasons and at huge economic and social costs.”
For the world to meet long-term climate goals, the IEA says global emissions should never recover to 2019 levels.
The IEA has long been urging governments to prioritize investments in renewable and low-carbon energy in their COVID-19 economic recovery packages. Thus far, only a few countries, such as those in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, have done so. Other countries, such as the U.S., have not supported clean energy in government relief.
Governments will need to do much more to reach long-term climate targets, the IEA stresses.
That includes more quickly retiring existing fossil fuel infrastructure or equipping it with technologies that lower its emissions. In this year’s outlook, the IEA finds existing or under-construction fossil fuel infrastructure, if allowed to run out its full lifetime, would already lock in warming of 1.65 degrees Celsius.
To reach net-zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the new benchmark set by climate scientists, governments would need to scale up clean energy massively in the next 10 years, the IEA says in its first detailed modeling of such a scenario.
For example, by 2030, the IEA says nearly 75% of global electricity generation would need to come from low-emissions sources (compared to 40% in 2019), and more than 50% of car sales globally would need to be electric (compared to 2.5% in 2019).
People would also need to change the way they live and consume, the IEA says. About one-third of the additional emissions reductions needed to reach global net-zero emissions by 2050 come from individual behavior changes, such as increased ride-sharing in ground transportation and shifts away from air travel for shorter flights due to increased video conferencing and use of high-speed rail.
