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The Covid-19 pandemic will produce an unprecedented annual drop in global greenhouse gas emissions of up to 7% by the end of 2020, but the impact of the slowdown on the atmosphere will be almost imperceptible, according to a major report led by the United Nations.
Analysis of the burning of fossil fuels found that emissions reached their lowest daily rate in April, but in June, when economies began to open up again, emissions were returning to the same levels seen the previous year.
Dr Pep Canadell, from Australia’s CSIRO climate science center and one of the report’s authors, said that by the end of 2020 the impact of the pandemic on slowing emissions would be at least double that of the crisis financial world of 2007, when economic activity fell.
“For this year, what this means for atmospheric CO2 concentrations fundamentally is nothing,” Canadell told Guardian Australia.
“That’s because we put 42 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere last year, so even three percent less means that we are still charging the atmosphere so heavily that this is not even a problem.”
The United in Science report was presented on Wednesday in Geneva by UN Secretary General António Guterres, who said that the recovery from the pandemic must become an opportunity to address the climate crisis.
Using analysis of global emissions through June, the report found that 2020 would see a drop of between 4% and 7% based on 2019 levels.
The report, coordinated by the UN World Meteorological Organization, said: “Although such a drop appears to be unprecedented, the amount emitted in maximum containment was still equivalent to emissions from 2006, just a decade and a half ago.”
In early April, global daily fossil fuel emissions were down 17% compared to the previous year’s average.
In early June, the report said that emissions had mostly returned to the levels of the same period in 2019, “showing the rapid return in emissions, as many countries loosen their containment restrictions.”
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere grows by about three parts per million each year.
The drop in emissions for 2020 would translate into a fall of 0.23 ppm at most, which, according to the report, was well within the changes observed year-over-year by natural factors.
In a statement, WMO Secretary General Professor Petteri Taalas said: “Greenhouse gas concentrations, which are already at their highest levels in 3 million years, have continued to rise.”
He said the years 2016 to 2020 were likely to be the warmest five-year period on record, adding: “This report shows that while many aspects of our lives have been disrupted in 2020, climate change has continued unabated. “.
Canadell, the executive director of the Global Carbon Project, told Guardian Australia that the drop in emissions would be unprecedented, even compared to a 1.5% drop experienced by the global financial crisis.
But he said that if the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic continued and more countries went into recession, the world could see sustained drops in emissions for several years.
He said: “We may have peaked with emissions last year, and then this year we have a decline. We could ride the wave to zero in the next few decades. “
Canadell said that falling emissions in 2020 and other possible drops could lead governments to react in two different ways.
Some governments may become complacent, while others may view the economic recovery as an opportunity to further mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
If governments do not take active steps to build cleaner economies, greenhouse gas emissions could increase as economies emerge from recession. “There are opportunities and risks as we move forward,” she said.
The report also summarized the world’s changing climate and the main impacts of recent years.
Between 2020 and 2024, there was a one in four chance that the world would experience a year in which global average temperatures were 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial levels.
The three largest economic losses from forest fires occurred in the last four years. The underlying heat that sparked the fires in the Arctic region in early 2020 was at least 600 times more likely due to the climate change caused, according to the report.
Every year from 2016 to 2020, the Arctic had been left with below-average sea ice levels at the end of each summer. Arctic sea ice in July 2020 was the lowest on record for that month.
Loss of ice from land-connected ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland continued to raise sea levels, according to the report.
