In 2023, there was a 1.1% increase in CO2 emissions related to energy. In contrast to the Paris Agreement’s requirement that global climate emissions reduce quickly, CO2 emissions in 2023 hit a new record high of 37.4 Gt.1. This estimate is based on an in-depth, study by the IEA of the most recent official national energy data, region by region and fuel by fuel, augmented by information on the state of the economy and weather.
Gaining knowledge of the different factors contributing to this increase in emissions can help one assess the state of the energy transition and its future prospects.
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In 2023, there was a 1.1% increase in emissions, or around 410 million tonnes (Mt CO2). In 2023, the global GDP grew at a rate of approximately 3%, although the percentage rise of emissions was significantly slower. Thus, CO2 grew more slowly last year than it did the year before due to the worldwide economic downturn.
The ten-year period ending in 2023 has seen a minor increase in global CO2 emissions of over 0.5% annually. This is not only the result of the COVID-19 pandemic: emissions dropped sharply in 2020, but by the next year they had returned to their pre-pandemic level. It was also not brought on by the weak growth of the world GDP, which throughout the course of the preceding ten years averaged a robust 3% annually, in keeping with the average for the previous fifty years.
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In comparison to the 1970s and 1980s, which witnessed significant disruptions from the two energy shocks of 1973–1980 and 1989–1990, as well as a global macroeconomic shock from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989–1990, the rate of emissions growth observed over the last ten years has slowed. Setting the past 10 years in a larger historical context reveals that the highly disruptive decades of World War I and the Great Depression were the only times CO2 emissions increase was relatively modest. Thus, even as the world’s wealth increases, CO2 emissions are structurally slowing down.
