A Conservative victory over the Liberals in the Canadian election could lead to nearly 800m extra tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
This amounts to the entire annual emissions of the UK and France combined.
These extra emissions would cause around C$233bn ($169bn) in climate damages around the world, based on the Canadian government’s official costings.
The right-leaning Conservative party, led by Pierre Poilievre, has pledged to cut one of the nation’s most significant climate policies – industrial carbon pricing – as well as other key regulations.
If these policies are removed and not replaced, modelling by researchers from Simon Fraser University and University of Victoria shows that Canada’s gradually declining emissions would likely start to creep up again in the coming years.
In contrast, emissions would continue to fall under the policies currently backed by Mark Carney’s centrist Liberal party, which has overseen a modest decrease over the past decade.
However, Carbon Brief analysis of the modelling also suggests that neither of the major parties’ policy platforms would put Canada on track to reach any of its climate targets.
These figures complement analysis by the Canadian government showing that the nation still needs to implement more ambitious measures in order to reach its target to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050.
(For more on Canada’s election, see Carbon Brief’s manifesto tracker, which captures what the major parties have said about climate change, energy and nature.)
Conservatives could raise emissions
Canada is the world’s 10th biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Significant contributors include its sizeable oil-and-gas sector and high emissions from transport.
The nation has been relatively slow to decarbonise. However, after a decade of rule by the Liberals, led by prime minister Justin Trudeau, there has been a small dip in Canada’s emissions.
With a federal election looming, an unpopular Trudeau resigned and was replaced in March by Carney, an economist with a background in climate finance.
His main rival in the election, which takes place on 28 April, will be the Conservatives, a party that until recently was the clear favourite. Conservative leader Poilievre has accused the Liberal government of pursuing “net-zero environmental extremism” and Carney of being part of the “radical net-zero movement”.
A sudden shift in polling that put the Liberals ahead has been widely attributed to their right-leaning opponents’ alignment with Donald Trump. This alignment has become politically toxic, following the US president’s tariffs and talk of annexing Canada.
Carbon pricing is at the heart of Canadian climate politics. Poilievre has long pledged to “axe the tax”, referring to a consumer levy that is meant to incentivise people to use less fossil fuel.
When Carney took office, his first action was to cut this carbon tax to zero, effectively ending his party’s signature climate policy.
In response, Poilievre pledged to cut the “entire carbon tax”, referring to a federal backstop on carbon pricing applied to major industrial emitters, such as fossil-fuel producers. He has also committed to abandoning other climate regulations.
The impact of these rollbacks is illustrated by the “Conservatives” line in the figure below, based on the party’s climate-related announcements to date. Notably, Canada’s emissions would be expected to start rising again, reversing some of the recent decline.
The “Liberals” line is based on current federal policies, excluding the consumer carbon tax. It would see a continued, steady drop in emissions if the Liberals retain power, even if they fail to implement any new climate policies after the election.
As such, a Conservative victory could mean an additional 771m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) entering the atmosphere by 2035.
Along with the US, Canada has long calculated the “social cost of carbon” and other greenhouse gases, in order to place a value on any emissions changes resulting from new regulations.
Based on Carbon Brief analysis of the government’s own figures for this metric, the extra emissions released under a Conservative government could result in global damages worth C$233bn ($169bn).
The emissions trajectories out to 2035 are based on modelling carried out by climate scientists Emma Starke, a PhD researcher at Simon Fraser University, and Dr Katya Rhodes, an associate professor at the University of Victoria.
Starke and Rhodes simulated the policy platforms of the two major Canadian parties using the CIMS energy-economy model, a well-established tool for understanding the country’s federal climate policies.
The researchers ran the models out to 2035, twice the normal parliamentary term length, to reflect the timespan it can take for policies to significantly affect annual emissions.
Starke tells Carbon Brief the “simple message” of their work is that a federal Liberal government is “likely to continue reducing emissions while a Conservative government would see them rise significantly”.
If the Conservative party were to trigger such a reversal, Canada would be the only G7 nation with rising emissions.
The nation is already something of an outlier, with slower emissions cuts than most major global-north economies and per-capita emissions three times higher than the EU average.
Even in the “Liberals” scenario modelled by Starke and Rhodes, emissions would only fall to 1990 levels in 2035. Meanwhile, nations such as the UK and Germany have already roughly halved their emissions from 1990 levels, even as their economies have expanded.
Canada continues to miss targets
Canada has a net-zero target for 2050. Under the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, it also has interim targets of cutting its emissions to 20% below 2005 levels by 2026, 40-45% by 2030 and 45-50% by 2035.
As the yellow lines in the chart above show, neither of the major Canadian parties has set out a policy programme that is sufficient to achieve the nation’s climate targets.
Emissions cuts from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), which count towards these targets, are not captured in the CIMS modelling of the two parties’ climate policies.
However, even when accounting for projected LULUCF emissions reductions, Carbon Brief analysis suggests a potential Liberal government’s annual emissions could be nearly one-third higher than the 2030 target.
Under a Conservative government, this gap could widen to more than 50% higher. (For more information about LULUCF estimates, see the Methodology.)
For context, the Conservatives’ gap in 2030 would be nearly equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Bangladesh. The Liberals’ gap in the same year would be roughly the size of Kuwait’s annual emissions.
This pessimistic outlook is supported by analysis from the Canadian government itself and independent analysts at the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI). Both have repeatedly shown that Canada is not on track to achieve its climate targets. (Analysts at Climate Action Tracker have also described Canada’s policies as “insufficient” to reach the world’’s Paris Agreement targets.)
This is confirmed by the most recent official projections, published by the government in December 2024 alongside Canada’s first “biennial transparency report” (BTR) to the UN.
The chart below shows that neither of the main scenarios modelled by the government would be sufficient for Canada to reach its targets, meaning further policies would be needed to get on track.
Even in the government’s most optimistic scenario, Canada would only achieve an 18% emissions cut by 2026 – rather than the 20% being targeted – and a 34% cut by 2030, rather than 40%.
The “reference” scenario, shown by the upper grey line in the chart above, accounts for all federal, provincial and territorial policies that were in place by August 2024 and assumes no further government action. (This means it does not include more recent actions, such as scrapping consumer carbon pricing.)
The “additional measures” scenario, shown by the lower grey line in the chart above, includes extra measures that were announced, but not yet implemented.
It also includes extra emissions cuts from nature-based solutions, agricultural changes and a small number of international carbon credits purchased from the Western Climate Initiative. (Both scenarios also include accounting contributions from LULUCF.)
As the chart shows, the “Liberals” scenario modelled by Starke and Rhodes broadly aligns with the reference scenario, once LULUCF contributions are included. (This is despite Starke and Rhodes excluding the consumer carbon tax, see below.)
In the introduction to Canada’s 2024 BTR, Liberal climate minister Steven Guilbeault writes:
“We have more work to do to achieve our enhanced 2030 target of 40-45% below 2005 emissions.”
The parties’ climate platforms
In an election dominated by the growing economic threat from the US, climate change has not been seen as a key issue by either politicians or voters. (See Carbon Brief’s election manifesto tracker for more on how climate has featured so far.)
The modelling by Starke and Rhodes captures the impact of the climate policy proposals that have been announced by the Liberals and the Conservatives ahead of election day.
These mainly consist of Conservative commitments to eliminate parts of Canada’s climate strategy, citing high costs. Perhaps most significantly, the party has pledged to scrap industrial carbon pricing.
This policy involves setting limits on emissions from high-polluting businesses such as steel and fossil-fuel companies. Industries pay for emissions above a certain limit and can obtain saleable credits if they reduce their emissions below that limit.
Provinces and territories can set up their own pricing systems, but there is a federal backstop representing the minimum standards that are required.
Oil-producing regions have already moved to abandon industrial carbon pricing, challenging the federal government to enforce the backstop.
Canada’s climate policies overlap and complement each other in various ways, making it difficult to assign shares of emissions cuts to specific policies.
However, the CCI calculated in 2024 that industrial carbon pricing was set to be the “single biggest driver of emissions reductions” by 2030, accounting for 20-48% of emissions cuts expected over the next five years.
Consumer carbon pricing, commonly referred to simply as the “carbon tax”, is paid by households and small businesses on fuels such as petrol and gas. The CCI estimates that it would only have been responsible for 8-14% of emissions cuts by 2030.
Both parties have abandoned consumer carbon pricing and this is captured in the emissions trajectories modelled by Starke and Rhodes.
The Conservative election manifesto confirms earlier pledges to scrap a list of climate policies, which are also captured in the modelling. These include Canada’s electric vehicle sales mandate, clean-fuel regulations and clean-electricity regulations.
The electric-vehicle targets, part of Canada’s objective to phase out petrol and diesel vehicle sales by 2035, have been dismissed by Poilievre as a “tax on the poor” that result in people being “forced to pay” extra for electric cars.
Poilievre has referred to clean-fuel regulations, which are intended to boost hydrogen and other alternative fuels in the transport sector, as another form of “carbon tax”. Government estimates suggest these measures would cut emissions by 26MtCO2s annually by 2030.
Unlike these transport-related measures, the clean-electricity regulations are not set to kick in until 2035, so they make minimal difference to the two parties’ trajectories.
The Conservatives have also pledged to scrap the planned emissions cap on Canada’s oil-and-gas sector. The modellers left this out of their simulations, as it has yet to be legislated and there are still uncertainties about its implementation.
The modelling assumes that the Conservatives remove these climate policies and then do not replace them with anything else.
This may not be how things would play out. While the Conservatives are traditionally more opposed to climate action than the Liberals, they have not confirmed that they would withdraw from their national or international obligations altogether.
Indeed, Poilievre has described “technology, not taxes” as “the best way to fight climate change”, saying clean industries should be encouraged in Canada by expanding tax credits. Such proposals are not captured in this modelling.
Starke and Rhodes write that these would in any case have limited impact:
“We do not analyse the effect of various subsidies such as tax credits and grants because all political parties promise these and they have only a marginal effect on greenhouse gas emissions.”
There is also uncertainty around the impact an escalating trade war might have in Canada – including its fossil-fuel sector – as politicians seek to bolster domestic industries. This makes it harder to predict future emissions trajectories under the two parties.
The Conservatives have been more vocal about backing Canada’s fossil-fuel industry, but the Liberals have also expressed support for the sector, including pipeline projects. However, the lack of clarity on such measures mean they only have a “modest effect” in the CIMS modelling, according to Starke and Rhodes.
Methodology
The “Liberal” and “Conservative” scenarios in this article come from modelling by Emma Starke, a PhD researcher at Simon Fraser University, and Dr Katya Rhodes, an associate professor at the University of Victoria.
They used the CIMS energy-economy model to simulate the impact of removing key climate policies, in cases where parties have been clear about their intention to do so.
They did not account for policies that were deemed to have “only a marginal effect on greenhouse gas emissions” and focused on “key regulatory and pricing policies because these are the most important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions”. Their approach is outlined in an article for Policy Options.
The analysis uses the “medium growth scenario” from Statistics Canada forecasts of population and GDP growth.
In the first chart, Carbon Brief uses historical emissions data from Canada’s official greenhouse gas inventory, which at the time of publication includes figures up to 2023. Note that Canadian historical emissions data has undergone changes between years as the government has shifted its methodology. This results in differences between datasets.
Canada’s emissions targets use the baseline year of 2005, for example a 40-45% reduction from 2005. In the most recent inventory, annual emissions in 2005 were 759MtCO2e. This baseline year does not include emissions from LULUCF.
However, Canada can use “accounting contributions” from the LULUCF sector to meet its emissions targets. This involves using a “reference level approach” for managed forest and associated harvested wood products, meaning the government compares actual emissions and removals to a projected “reference level”. It uses a “net-net approach” for all the other LULUCF sub-sectors, meaning both emissions are removals are accounted for to get a net emissions figure.
For simplicity, Carbon Brief has left LULUCF contributions, which are relatively small, out of the historical emissions figures used in the first chart.
The CIMS modelling does not include emissions from LULUCF, so these are not included in the “Liberal” and “Conservative” emissions trajectories. However, in order to calculate the size of the emissions gap between the trajectories and Canada’s future targets, Carbon Brief simply added figures from government projections to these trajectories. These figures amount to emissions reductions of roughly 28-31MtCO2e annually from 2030 out to 2040.
In the second chart, Carbon Brief has used emissions data from the Canadian government’s most recent emissions projections, which appeared in its BTR, published at the end of 2024. These figures are slightly different from the ones in the most recent inventory, include LULUCF contributions and only go out to 2022.
Besides LULUCF contributions, the government reports separately on the impact of nature-based climate solutions, “agriculture measures” and credits purchased under the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), all of which are considered “additional measures” in its modelling. Nature-based solutions and “agriculture measures” cut another 12MtCO2e annually from 2030 onwards, whereas WCI credits are barely used. These figures are included in the “additional measures” government estimate in the second chart.
The post Analysis: Conservative election win could add 800m tonnes to Canada’s emissions by 2035 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Conservative election win could add 800m tonnes to Canada’s emissions by 2035
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The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.
For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.
The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.
This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.
The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.
Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.
In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.
(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high
Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.
Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.
As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.
This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)
The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly
The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.
However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.
Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.
Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.
Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.
But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.
As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.
It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.
The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).
Global temperature rise
The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.
We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface
temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.
While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.
We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.
This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.
Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system
While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.
Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.
For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.
Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.
Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).
Sea level rise and the energy imbalance
Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.
It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.
Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.
This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.
Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.
This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.
(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)
The bigger picture
Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.
A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.
These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.
This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.
However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.
Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.
This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.
The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.
Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.
The post Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming
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