Pandemic restrictions saw an unprecedented fall in greenhouse gas emissions in the first half of 2020, larger than during the 2008 financial crisis and even World War II, experts said recently. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that during the first six months of this year, 8.8 per cent less CO2 was emitted than in the same period in 2019 — a total decrease of 1,551 million tonnes.
As governments ordered lockdowns to try to crush the first wave of COVID-19, CO2 emissions from transport, power and aviation plummeted, the international team of researchers said. Using data including hourly electricity production, vehicle traffic from more than 400 cities worldwide, daily passenger flights and monthly production and consumption figures, they determined that the emissions drop was the largest in modern history.
The research not only offers a much more precise look at COVID-19’s impact on global energy consumption than previous analyses, but also suggests what fundamental steps could be taken to stabilise the global climate in the aftermath of the pandemic. “What makes our study unique is the analysis of meticulously collected near-real-time data,” said Zhu Liu from the Tsinghua University in China. We were able to get a much faster and more accurate overview, including timelines that show how emissions decreases have corresponded to lockdown measures in each country,” said Zhu.
The team found that CO2 emissions from transport decreased by 40 percent in the first half of 2020, and power production and industry emissions fell 22 percent and 17 percent respectively. With more people working from home, the study showed a perhaps surprising three percent fall in residential emissions — something researchers attributed to an abnormally warm winter leading to lower heating consumption.
The researchers noted that in April, at the height of the first wave of coronavirus infections, when most major countries shut down their public life and parts of their economy, emissions even declined by 16.9 per cent. The lockdown measures during various outbreaks resulted in emission drops that are normally seen only on a short-term basis on holidays such as Christmas or the Chinese Spring Festival, they said.
“While the CO2 drop is unprecedented, decreases of human activities cannot be the answer,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Instead we need structural and transformational changes in our energy production and consumption systems. Individual behaviour is certainly important, but what we really need to focus on is reducing the carbon intensity of our global economy,” Schellnhuber added.
