Carbon Dioxide Emissions Have Dropped 17 Percent During the Pandemic

If you can rely on humanity to do anything consistently, it’s to spew more and more CO ₂ into the atmosphere. Even after the world’s nations signed the Paris Agreement in 2016, each setting their own targets to rein in emissions—India, for instance, pledging to cut theirs by a third by 2030—still they tick up a few percent each year. But then came Covid-19, which has crippled economies and trapped people at home and finally realized the dream of the Paris Agreement—and then some.

Writing today in Nature Climate Change, researchers detail that by early April, daily global CO₂ emissions had plummeted by 17 percent compared to mean 2019 levels. Some regions, like the United States and the United Kingdom, have seen their emissions fall by a third, due in large part to people driving less. Projecting forward, the researchers calculate that even if confinement measures are relaxed a bit, this year we could see a 7 percent drop overall in global emissions, more than double the 3 percent drop following the 2008 financial crisis.

Getting at these figures takes a whole lot of digging through data, because scientists can’t just train a satellite at the planet and get CO₂ emissions in real-time. “Because CO₂ stays in the atmosphere a long, long time, even though we had a massive change in emissions, that did not affect the stock of CO₂ in the atmosphere very much,” says climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, lead author on the paper. “It’s small compared to what we’ve put in the atmosphere for decades.”

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Plus, that CO₂ signal is muddied by Earth’s natural processes, like trees sucking in the gas and expelling oxygen. And with a satellite, you can’t measure levels of a gas at the surface rather than what you would find a mile in the air. “We’re measuring a whole column amount of CO₂,” says Northern Arizona University climate scientist Kevin Gurney, who models emissions but wasn’t involved in this new work. “It’s not a flux at the surface. It’s just a big cross-section of the number of molecules in the atmosphere.”

So Le Quéré and her colleagues waded through mountains of reported data instead. They looked at statistics about car traffic, electricity usage, airlin