Global Daily CO$_2$ emissions for the year 2020
Abstract
The diurnal cycle CO emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production reflect seasonality, weather conditions, working days, and more recently the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, for the first time we provide a daily CO emission dataset for the whole year of 2020 calculated from inventory and near-real-time activity data (called Carbon Monitor project: https://carbonmonitor.org). It was previously suggested from preliminary estimates that did not cover the entire year of 2020 that the pandemics may have caused more than 8% annual decline of global CO emissions. Here we show from detailed estimates of the full year data that the global reduction was only 5.4% (-1,901 MtCO, ). This decrease is 5 times larger than the annual emission drop at the peak of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. However, global CO emissions gradually recovered towards 2019 levels from late April with global partial re-opening. More importantly, global CO emissions even increased slightly by +0.9% in December 2020 compared with 2019, indicating the trends of rebound of global emissions. Later waves of COVID-19 infections in late 2020 and corresponding lockdowns have caused further CO emissions reductions particularly in western countries, but to a much smaller extent than the declines in the first wave. That even substantial world-wide lockdowns of activity led to a one-time decline in global CO emissions of only 5.4% in one year highlights the significant challenges for climate change mitigation that we face in the post-COVID era. These declines are significant, but will be quickly overtaken with new emissions unless the COVID-19 crisis is utilized as a break-point with our fossil-fuel trajectory, notably through policies that make the COVID-19 recovery an opportunity to green national energy and development plans.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.02526,
title = {Global Daily CO$_2$ emissions for the year 2020},
author = {Zhu Liu and Zhu Deng and Philippe Ciais and Jianguang Tan and Biqing Zhu and Steven J. Davis and Robbie Andrew and Olivier Boucher and Simon Ben Arous and Pep Canadel and Xinyu Dou and Pierre Friedlingstein and Pierre Gentine and Rui Guo and Chaopeng Hong and Robert B. Jackson and Daniel M. Kammen and Piyu Ke and Corinne Le Quere and Crippa Monica and Greet Janssens-Maenhout and Glen Peters and Katsumasa Tanaka and Yilong Wang and Bo Zheng and Haiwang Zhong and Taochun Sun and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.02526},
year = {2022}
}