Global Fossil CO2 Emissions Hit Record High With No End in Sight
The 2024 Global Carbon Budget report warns of rising fossil fuel and deforestation impacts, urging immediate action.
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have reached a record high in 2024, according to the Global Carbon Budget 2024 report, co-authored by GEOG Associate Research Professor Louise Chini, Professor and Associate Chair George Hurtt, Assistant Research Professor Lei Ma, and Adjunct Professor Ben Poulter. The annual report, produced by the Global Carbon Project, has been providing updates on trends in global carbon emissions and sinks since 2006.
The report gives projections of fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 37.4 billion tonnes, up 0.8% from 2023. Despite the urgent need to cut emissions to slow climate change, the researchers say there is still “no sign” that the world has reached a peak in fossil CO2 emissions.
With projected emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) of 4.2 billion tonnes, total CO2 emissions are projected to be 41.6 billion tonnes in 2024, up from 40.6 billion tonnes last year. Over the last 10 years, fossil CO2 emissions have risen while land-use change CO2 emissions have declined on average,leaving overall emissions roughly level over that period.
This year, both fossil and land-use change CO2 emissions are set to rise, with drought conditions exacerbating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation fires during the El Niño climate event of 2023-2024. With over 40 billion tonnes released each year at present, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise – driving increasingly dangerous global warming.
These rising emissions are compounded by significant changes in the global land sink, which refers to areas that absorb and store carbon, like forests and vegetation.. In 2023, the land sink was 2.3 ± 1 GtC yr−1, which is 1.6 GtC lower than in 2022 and the lowest estimate since 2015. This reduced sink is primarily driven by a response of tropical land ecosystems to the onset of the 2023–2024 El Niño event, combined with large wildfires in Canada in 2023. The preliminary 2024 estimate is around 3.2 gigatonnes of carbon per year (GtC yr−1), similar to the decadal average, consistent with a land sink emerging from the El Niño state.
Fossil emissions dominate in the Northern Hemisphere, while land-use emissions are important in the tropics. The North Atlantic and Southern Ocean are carbon sinks while the tropical ocean is a source of CO2. Tropical, temperate and boreal forest are the main terrestrial carbon sinks.
The report marks GEOG’s 11th year contributing the official historical land-use data to the Global Carbon Budget, and the second year incorporating advanced land carbon modelling using the new global Ecosystem Demography (EDv3 model).
As Chini explained, “Each year we produce an updated historical land-use reconstruction for this study to use to compute land-use-related emissions. We specifically focus on incorporating new remote sensing data for regions of importance for the carbon budget,” hese data updates aim to reduce uncertainties at the national scale and give better understanding of the impacts of land-use change in these regions.
The new Ecosystem Demography model represents a significant advancement in carbon research. “We estimated global annual land carbon sink and emissions from 1700 to 2023, considering the impacts of climate change, elevated CO2 levels, and land use activities on vegetation growth,” said Ma. This next-generation model is able to compute both the land sink and land-use emissions in a consistent framework and is designed to enhance the understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle and inform policy.
Hurtt highlighted the model’s versatility, noting that the same ecosystem model was also recently used as a key component of Maryland’s new remote-sensing based forest carbon monitoring system. Moreover, the land-use model provides critical input for global climate models, demonstrating the high application readiness of both the land-use data and ED model across various scales and applications.
The urgency of the findings was underscored by Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study.
“The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked,” he warned. Time is running out to meet the Paris Agreement goals – and world leaders meeting at COP29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions to give us a chance of staying well below 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels.”
Other key findings from the 2024 Global Carbon Budget include:
- Globally, emissions from different fossil fuels in 2024 are projected to increase: coal (0.2%), oil (0.9%), gas (2.4%). These contribute 41%, 32% and 21% of global fossil CO2 emissions respectively. Given the uncertainty in the projections, it remains possible that coal emissions could decline in 2024.
- China’s emissions (32% of the global total) are projected to marginally increase by 0.2%, although the projected range includes a possible decrease in emissions.
- US emissions (13% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 0.6%.
- India’s emissions (8% of the global total) are projected to increase by 4.6%.
- European Union emissions (7% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 3.8%.
- Emissions in the rest of the world (38% of the global total) are projected to increase by 1.1%.
- International aviation and shipping (3% of the global total, and counted separately from national/regional totals) are projected to increase by 7.8% in 2024, but remain below their 2019 pre-pandemic level by 3.5%.
- Globally, emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) have decreased by 20% in the past decade, but are set to rise in 2024.
- Permanent CO2 removal through reforestation and afforestation (new forests) is offsetting about half of the permanent deforestation emissions.
- Current levels of technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (excluding nature-based means such as reforestation) only account for about one-millionth of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels.
- Atmospheric CO2 levels are set to reach 422.5 parts per million in 2024, 2.8 parts per million above 2023, and 52% above pre-industrial levels.
- The effects of the temporary El Niño climate event also led to a reduction in carbon absorption by ecosystems on land (known as the land CO2 “sink”) in 2023, which is projected to recover as El Niño ended by the second quarter of 2024.
- Emissions from fires in 2024 have been above the average since the beginning of the satellite record in 2003, particularly due to the extreme 2023 wildfire season in Canada (which persisted in 2024) and intense drought in Brazil.
- The land and ocean CO2 sinks combined continued to take up around half of the total CO2 emissions, despite being negatively impacted by climate change.
Main image: Collage of six graphs covering fossil fuels, atmospheric growth rate, land use emissions, land sink, budget imbalance and ocean sink. Courtesy of the Global Carbon Project
Published on Tue, 04/01/2025 - 09:58