Hundreds of scientists gathered in Oxford last week to discuss the many different ways of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the role it can play in tackling climate change.
The third international conference on negative CO2 emissions focused on the latest science, policy gaps and methods of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). (Carbon Brief also reported from the first conference in Gothenburg in 2018.)
Discussions ranged from the potential of different technologies to the need to avoid CDR methods drawing attention away from emissions reductions.
Around 360 scientists, researchers, industry representatives and other stakeholders attended the four-day event at the University of Oxford, along with more than 150 people online.
Talks centred on the “natural” and “novel” ways to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it on land, underground or in the ocean.
Carbon Brief attended the conference to report on the dozens of plenaries and parallel sessions that focused on a wide range of issues around CO2 removal.
- The state of CO2 removal
- What CO2 removal techniques were discussed?
- How is CDR included in government policies?
- How does CDR fit into future emissions pathways?
- What are the potential problems with CO2 removal?
- What are the next steps for CO2 removal?
The state of CO2 removal
Dr Steve Smith – the executive director of Oxford Net Zero and CO2RE – kicked off the conference in the opening plenary.
Smith is the lead author on the second “State of CDR” report, which outlines the current state of knowledge around CDR, and used his talk to outline some of its findings. (Read Carbon Brief’s nine key takeaways from the report here.)
Smith explained that “conventional” CDR – mainly through land use, land-use change and forestry activities – make up the “lion’s share” of current CDR efforts, accounting for almost all of the current 2bn tonnes of CO2 removed from the atmosphere each year. (Humans emit around 40bn tonnes each year.)
“Novel” CDR methods currently remove a much-smaller 1.3m tonnes of CO2 each year – less than 0.1% of total carbon dioxide removals – he noted.
Of the novel approaches, he explained that biochar is the main player. This is followed by bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which is confined to “essentially two plants in the US”.
All other CDR efforts, such as direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) are a “tiny, tiny sliver”. This breakdown is outlined in the graphic from the report below.
Smith noted that almost all current model simulations that limit future warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels use CDR methods such as BECCS.
However, he said that many models – such as those that feed into reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – begin their projections from the year 2020. Many models assume that emissions already peaked in 2020, but emissions today are continuing to rise. Smith warned:
“We are already overshooting.”
Speaking to Carbon Brief at the conference, Smith said that there is a “tension” between fast and responsible action to scale up carbon dioxide removals. He added:
“People are seeing the urgency of the climate problem and saying we need to scale lots of things now and fast.
“So probably the basic biogeochemical principles are sound, but [an important step is] actually measuring how much carbon is taken up, how quickly and what are the broader impacts on the environment and on people.”
In a separate session, experts discussed “measurement, reporting and verification” – ways to assess methods of CDR technologies to ensure they are working effectively. This is similar to discussions around monitoring the voluntary carbon market. (See Carbon Brief’s special series on carbon offsetting for more.)
Dr Paul Zakkour from Carbon Counts, a climate and energy consulting company, opened the second day of the conference by discussing the importance and challenges of monitoring, reporting and verifying claims about CO2 removals.
Zakkour said the most important principles for any carbon removal carbon credits are ensuring that they are real, measurable, additional, not double counted, not leaking and permanent.
He said there are more than 50 methodologies crediting “natural” methods of CDR such as forest management and soil organic carbon.
There are around 20 methodologies for novel CDR methods. Almost all of these methodologies were developed in just the past three years, he said.
However, he added that it is unclear how many projects are actually using these methodologies to enter voluntary carbon markets.
Zakkour noted that there is a “compromise” between ramping up carbon removals and ensuring they are done effectively, safely and in line with best scientific practices.
What CO2 removal techniques were discussed?
Over the four-day conference, there were dozens of breakout sessions discussing different CO2 removal techniques, ranging from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to enhanced rock weathering. Carbon Brief focuses on a few of the methods here:
Forestry
Among the land-based CDR methods, forestry was a major point of discussion.
Dr Yuan Yao from Yale University discussed her ongoing research into sequestering carbon through afforestation and reforestation on “marginal land” in Brazil. Her research team examined the CO2 impacts of “innovative forest mosaics”.
Xueyuan Gao from the University of Maryland, whose research is currently under peer review, developed a novel framework to try and detect tropical tree cover gains, using forest management and cover change datasets. The study particularly focused on former agricultural lands.
At a separate session focused on Earth system modelling, Prof Julia Pongratz – a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology – told the conference that modelling studies on large-scale afforestation and reforestation often involve “unrealistic” or “unambitious” spatiotemporal patterns.
Pongratz presented a pattern of afforestation and reforestation that she and her team developed. The pattern is aligned with “ambitious” country pledges and would result in 600m hectares of afforested/reforested land by 2060, while staying in line with “biodiversity and techno/socio/economic considerations”, she said.
This level of afforestation and reforestation would capture enough CO2 to offset global warming by 0.2C by the end of the century, Pongratz told the conference.
And at another session, Dr Clemens Schwingshackl, a researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, presented results from the state of CDR report on afforestation and reforestation. He explained that CDR from these two sources currently capture around 2,000m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year – equivalent to around 5-6% of current fossil fuel emissions.
He added that there are “hotspots” of tree planting. The main one is in China, where there are lots of forest plantations, he explained. And the other is in Europe, where a long history of deforestation is now being reversed in many areas.
Dr Kate Dooley, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Melbourne, presented the results of the 2022 land gap report, which assesses how much land is required to meet current NDCs and net-zero pledges.
Dooley, who is lead author on the report, explained that 194 countries were assessed and that, collectively, their afforestation, reforestation and BECCS pledges require one billion hectares of land. This is an ”unprecedented” amount of land-use change, which could increase risks to ecosystems, food security and the durability of carbon stocks, she warned.
She added that 70% of the total land required by these climate pledges comes from just a few, high-emitting countries.
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
Another session focused on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a technology where plants are burned for energy and the resulting CO2 emissions are captured from air and stored under land or sea.
Dr Mai Bui from Imperial College London outlined research around minimising the cost of BECCS while ensuring the technology is CO2-efficient.
Her research shows that using biomass with a “low carbon footprint” and reducing supply chain emissions can help to maximise the overall CO2 removals of BECCS. She said that this is important in ensuring that the technology is implemented correctly, noting:
“You can do BECCs badly and end up emitting more CO2 than you can capture.”
Prof Iain Donnison from Aberystwyth University discussed the possibilities and realities of upscaling “perennial biomass crops” in the UK for the purpose of removing GHG emissions.
He said that a “significant challenge” with BECCS is producing enough wood and other types of biomass to burn for the technology.
He and other researchers are looking at the technical barriers to scaling up biomass crops, trialling different plant options such as miscanthus. Another issue around increasing growth of biomass crops is incentivising farmers to grow them, he said, adding:
“How do we get these to be seen as a more usual option for farmers?”
Dr Sabine Egerer from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich discussed research looking at the different levels of efficiency of various land-based CO2 removal methods, namely afforestation and planting biomass crops for use in CDR technologies.
This research, which is currently undergoing peer review, finds that biomass plantations are more efficient at removing carbon from the atmosphere over time. But this varies in different parts of the world, such as China where afforestation has more benefits.
Kristine Karstens from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research discussed ongoing research into the benefits of different ways to use biomass in CDR – residue recycling and BECCS.
Her findings show that using agricultural residues for BECCS has more benefits for carbon removal overall compared to residue recycling, per tonne of biomass.
Separately, Ruben Prutz – a PhD student at the Mercator Research Institute – talked about the implications of land-based CDR for biodiversity.
He looked at more than 130,000 species globally, and mapped how afforestation and BECCS would change biodiversity refugia – habitats that are less prone to extreme changes in environmental conditions than surrounding areas, and which often act as safe havens for species.
He showed that the impacts of land-based CDR are unequally distributed, mainly falling on countries in the global south.
There were also two conference sessions on direct air carbon capture, in which scientists discussed technological developments and the different engineering challenges that face the sector.
Soils and biochar
The ability of soils to sequester carbon from the atmosphere was a key discussion point at the conference. There was also a session on biochar – charcoal that is added to soils rather than burned as a fuel.
Prof Pete Smith from the University of Aberdeen discussed an ongoing systematic review looking at the side effects of different types of CDR on biodiversity, air, water quality and other factors (see: What are the next steps for CO2 removal?).
Smith said the research is not expected to yield “big shifts in the cost and potentials” of these methods, but it aims to provide deeper analysis on the co-benefits and trade-offs of each method.
He added that previous research has found there is a potential to remove 5bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2e) each year from soils.
Dr Jeewani Peduru Hewa from Bangor University discussed ongoing research on greenhouse gas removals through peatland restoration, including applying biochar to peatlands.
A number of universities and NGOs are working together to restore different peatland sites across the UK to assess whether “innovative” land management can secure long-term greenhouse gas removal systems, she said, noting:
“When peatlands are healthy they are good for carbon sequestration. But if we drain the peatlands for agriculture or something else, it is a problem.”
Rewetting peatlands helps them to absorb carbon dioxide, but this can also cause methane emissions to rise. Her experimental research findings show that applying biochar to peatlands can lower both CO2 and methane emissions.
These findings were concluded over the course of one year and further research is needed to assess impacts over a longer time period, she said.
Marine CO2 removal
Removing carbon through the ocean was another significant discussion point at the conference.
Speaking in a plenary session on measuring, reporting and verification, Prof David Ho from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa said that marine carbon removal still has many challenges to overcome before it is feasible on a wide scale.
Assessing this type of carbon removal is “challenging” due to the ocean’s natural variability, carbonate chemistry, ocean mixing and circulation, Ho said. It is difficult to pinpoint one specific reason for a change or an increase in CO2 sequestration.
Ho said that “abiotic” methods of marine CO2 removal are “easier” to monitor, report on and verify. These include ocean alkalinity enhancement. Last month, the carbon removals registry Isometric said it released a “world first” protocol for ocean alkalinity carbon removal.
Asked by an audience member about whether marine CO2 removal should be excluded from carbon markets due to the level of uncertainties, Ho said the ocean has the “potential” to make an impact, but advised caution. He added:
“I think if we can do a good job of quantifying the uncertainties…this is how ramp-ups can work. If buyers and sellers can trust each other, I think the ocean can certainly play a role.”
In a separate session on marine CO2 removal, Dr Miranda Boettcher – a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs – presented the results of a workshop that she ran in Germany, in which she asked participants to rank the main risks of marine CDR.
She highlighted public opinion, political dynamics, the “performance” of science and pressure from industry as key conditions that will drive policy developments in marine CDR.
Separately, Dr Christine Merk – deputy director of the Global Commons and Climate Policy research centre at the Kiel Institute – presented the results of a survey held in six different countries on public perceptions of marine CDR.
She found that more than 80% of people in Germany and Canada had never heard of marine CDR, compared to 28% and 41% in Taiwan and China, respectively. She added that people are least likely to have heard of ocean acidity enhancement and most likely to have heard of marine-based BECCS.
How is CDR included in government policies?
The conference heard from a number of researchers about the role of government in regulating CO2 removal, including a plenary panel session dedicated to the topic of CDR in national policymaking.
Prof Gideon Henderson, a professor of Earth sciences and chief scientific adviser to the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), spoke about how CDR is used in carbon markets.
Henderson said that a government’s role is to fix market failures through regulation and deregulation, and to be stewards of the environment. However, he noted that governments cannot easily regulate the voluntary carbon market and said it should “try to get more engaged” – for example, by implementing monitoring, reporting and verification measures.
He added that the voluntary carbon market is “not trusted” by many people, but argued that it is important to keep the market going, to enable experts to try things out and eventually build a more trusted system.
Speaking on national policies, he said that countries are “not quite there yet” and argued that CDR measures should be included in countries’ nationally determined pledges under the Paris Agreement.
Dr Fabiola Zerbini, director at the department of forests at Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, told the conference that the country has pledged to restore 12m hectares of deforested land and reach “zero deforestation” by 2030.
The role of the government as a “catalyst” for this type of action is “key”, she said. She argued that until forests and the environmental services that they provide are considered to have “real value”, the system will need to be regulated by governments.
Prof Jennifer Wilcox, former principal deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Energy, told the conference about the CDR projects in place in the US. She highlighted the regional direct air capture (DAC) hubs program, which is investing $3.5bn into direct air capture.
She also talked about how the fossil fuel companies responsible for extraction could play an important role in CDR:
“It could be interesting for the energy companies responsible for resource extraction to realise they could leverage their structures to put carbon back into the ground. [We] need to steer energy companies so that when they put infrastructure in, it can be used for CDR.”
When asked about the upcoming US election, she said that the administration has put frameworks in place that will make their work sustainable and so she did not think that a Republican victory would cause all current projects to be “erased”. However, she did express concern about whether measures would be kept in place to make sure that the projects “benefit people”.
Dr Fabien Ramos, carbon removals lead at the European Commission, talked about policies that the EU is putting in place to monitor and verify CDR in its emission trading system, and the regulations being put in place to assess the quality of carbon offsets.
In a separate session on global policy, Harry Smith, a researcher from the University of East Anglia, presented his work on the inclusion of “residual” or “hard-to-abate” emissions in national policies. (Read Carbon Brief’s coverage of this study.)
Smith analysed the national climate strategies of 71 counties, and found that only 26 of them quantify residual emissions at the time of reaching net-zero emissions.
He noted that countries define their own residual emissions and found that the percentage of a country’s peak emissions that it considers “residual” can range from 5% to 50%.
He also explained that despite making up the majority of residual emissions, agricultural emissions are “hardly mentioned as residual”. Industry sources are mentioned the most, he found.
In a separate session, Klaas Korte from the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research discussed ongoing research into policies to incentivise the efficient use of CO2 removal in the agriculture sector.
“Carbon farming” – farm practices focused on climate mitigation – may be one way to bridge the gap between the EU’s “ambitious targets” to cut agricultural emissions and the reality of these cuts so far, he said.
His research showed a number of ways to make carbon farming more attractive than conventional methods: subsidising costs of CDR measures, implementing CDR requirements on state-owned lands and excluding conventional practices on state-owned land.
The best solution, he said, is a mix of payment for public goods that avoid adverse environmental effects and bridging knowledge gaps among farmers and other landowners.
Dr Lauri Kujanpää from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland discussed the carbon removal possibilities in Finland.
Kujanpää said that his research points to geological storage as a “key solution” for CO2 removal in Finland, but noted that the country currently has no national policy measures for this type of CO2 storage.
How does CDR fit into future emissions pathways?
Dr William Lamb from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change discussed recent research on the CDR “gap”, which was covered by Carbon Brief.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that plans to “draw down” CO2 from the atmosphere “fall short” of the quantities needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Assessing a range of scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5C, the authors found a “CDR gap” in 2050 of 0.4bn-5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year.
To fill this gap, Lamb said there is a need to identify and quantify country plans around CDR as nations are currently not required to specify these removals in the national plans submitted at COP climate summits.
He highlighted that there are differences in the land-use sector carbon emissions in national inventories and scientific models. (This was covered in more detail in a Carbon Brief guest post last year.)
Most countries only include plans about conventional, land-based CDR methods in their national plans up to 2030, Lamb explained. Some long-term emissions reduction plans include novel techniques such as BECCS.
Dr Matthew Gidden from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis discussed similar issues about aligning emissions scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with national land emissions inventories.
Gidden said there are a number of differences between the models and inventories, including how countries define their “managed land” and carbon fluxes.
His research, published in Nature last year, aligned the IPCC mitigation pathways with national greenhouse gas inventories to allow a direct comparison. The findings suggested that key emission-cutting goals are “harder to achieve” than currently outlined and that countries would have to reach net-zero emissions sooner than 2050.
Dr Kati Koponen from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland presented findings from a project assessing the pathways for CDR in the EU.
These findings highlighted the importance of focusing on both natural and novel CDR methods, but also mentioned the need to keep dependence on CDR “to a minimum”.
Koponen said the findings also show that existing EU CDR policies “are not sufficient for deep emission reductions”.
Dr Jennifer Pett-Ridge from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outlined the findings of a recent report on the options for CDR in the US.
The report – put together by almost 70 scientists and 13 institutions – looks at regional possibilities for CDR and storage. Pett-Ridge said the US can reduce 1bn tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050 using CDR methods, at an annual cost of $129bn.
She said it is sensible to initially focus on forestry and soils. Biomass conversion also has big potentials, she added. The researchers also analysed issues in inequity and justice as part of their analysis.
Meanwhile, Prof Kirsten Zickfeld – a professor of climate science at Simon Fraser University – discussed the global temperature response to CDR. She simulated 100GtCO2 of CDR from the atmosphere and calculated how atmospheric CO2 levels changed as the Earth system re-equilibrates.
She then modelled how the temperature of the planet would change in response. Comparing 100GtCO2 of CDR with a simple 100GtCO2 reduction in global emissions, she found that they probably do not have equivalent effects on global temperatures.
However, she says that due to the uncertainty in the models, it is unclear whether carbon removal drives a greater or smaller change in global temperatures than the same amount of reduced CO2 emissions. (Zickfeld explains more about this “asymmetrical” response in a Carbon Brief guest post from 2021.)
In a separate session, Dr Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talked about the risks of relying on uncertain CDR technologies in climate policy.
Edwards noted how difficult it is to predict the uptake of CDR over the coming century and explained the dangers of scenarios in which politicians rely on high CDR deployment, only for its rollout to be much lower than expected. She concluded that the most robust strategy is “planning for the worst and hoping for the best”.
Finally, Tabea Dorndorf, a doctoral researcher at Potsdam Institute for climate impact research, discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of biochar, BECCS, DACCS and enhanced rock weathering. She explained that in a “middle of the road” scenario, it is likely that BECCS will be the biggest player, due to its higher carbon and biomass efficiency.
What are the potential problems with CO2 removal?
One of the main concerns around CDR is that promoting negative emissions technologies might draw attention away from the need to reduce emissions – a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence”.
The final day of the conference addressed this concern in a plenary session called, “How do we ensure CDR supports emission reductions instead of slowing them?”, chaired by Dr Holly Buck – an assistant professor from the University at Buffalo.
To open the session, Buck invited the conference attendees to fill in a poll, asking how concerned they are that CDR could slow down emissions reductions, and how concerned they are that mitigation deterrence could slow down CDR development.
The results, shown below, show that conference attendees were generally more concerned about the former than the latter.
The panel agreed unanimously that CDR is not a substitute for cutting emissions and that it should only be used for hard-to-abate or “residual” emissions.
Dr Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at the financial technology company Stripe, warned that if society does not cut emissions, even a “wildly successful” CDR effort will still only reduce global warming from 2.7C to 2.6C by 2100, so mitigation is still crucial. (Haufather is also a climate science contributor for Carbon Brief.)
He added that mitigation deterrence in private companies is one of the main problems with CDR, explaining that it is almost always cheaper for companies to buy a carbon offset than to take action to reduce their own emissions, saying that the low price of CDR offsets do not reflect their true value. (See Carbon Brief’s special series for more on carbon offsets.)
This means that companies are more likely to buy CDR offsets than decarbonise their own industries, Hausfather said, warning that this “lets companies off the hook” on reducing their own emissions.
He told the conference that to correct for this, governments need to “play a much more active role” in regulation.
Hausfather also argued that “in a world in which CDR didn’t exist, global emissions would not be much different,” saying that in his view, the reason people are emitting today is not because they are banking on CDR, but because mitigation is too expensive.
He said there has been plenty of “much-needed” criticism of carbon offsets, highlighting an investigation into Verra carbon offsets, which found that more than 90% are “worthless”.
However, he noted that part of the response to criticism has been a “large-scale retreat by companies” of all types of offsets – including those which are “good”. He said that the negative emissions community needs to be clear about what companies should do, as well as what they shouldn’t.
Dr Nils Markusson – a senior lecturer at Lancaster University’s environment centre – shared his worry that CDR gives governments and companies a reason to delay or avoid decarbonising their economies.
He called it “suspicious” that governments and companies seem “very optimistic about CDR while very pessimistic about mitigation”. He warned that “CDR optimism sits very comfortably alongside a lack of ambition for phasing out fossil fuels” and called it “a way of avoiding politics”.
Dr Sara Nawaz, a researcher at the University of Oxford, shared concerns that companies are responsible for defining their own residual emissions and could define them in the way that best suits them.
Nawaz also noted the danger that CDR could lead to “competition with other resources that are needed for mitigation, for example land, water and energy”. She also told the conference that CDR can “bake in” an “equivalence” between CO2 emissions and removals that may not exist.
Hausfather said that the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) – a “corporate climate action organisation” have “got the framework right” by suggesting separate emissions and removals targets. (The SBTi recently got into hot water over its stance on carbon credits.)
Hausfather also highlighted the problem of greenwashing, telling that audience that he worried that companies would spend some money implementing some CDR, but then spend vast amounts more money publicising it.
Hausfather also noted the tendency for models to be over reliant on CDR. He explained that in many model simulations, global temperatures overshoot key thresholds early in the century and then CDR is used to bring temperature back down later in the century. Models are “far too cavalier about overshoot”, he said.
What are the next steps for CO2 removal?
In the penultimate plenary session of the conference, Prof Sabine Fuss from the Mercator Institute presented the initial stages of a “systematic review ecosystem on CDR”.
She explained that there has been “exponential growth” in literature on CDR, with some 23,000 papers included in the latest IPCC assessment cycle alone.
Hundreds of experts – including many scientists in the conference room – are working to synthesise this literature, Fuss said. She explained that the team has already grouped the studies into “clusters” of different CDR methods and developed a shared protocol so that methods and definitions are consistent across the groups.
For each cluster, an expert-led review team will work to produce an “in-depth paper”, Fuss said. A few group leads presented the early stages of their work.
Mijndert Van der Spek – an associate professor at Heriot Watt University and lead of the DAC group, explained that they “only” have 800 papers to review. Meanwhile, Prof Claudia Kammann, a researcher at Hochschule Geisenheim University, said her team on biochar had 38,000 papers to work with.
There are around 2,000 papers on BECCS to review and more than 2,000 for a cross-cutting topic on “monitoring, reporting and verification”, the respective leads of these teams said.
Dr Finn Muller-Hansen is a researcher at the Mercator research institute and head of a cross-cutting group on public perceptions to CDR. He explained that most of the 165 papers in this area of research are focused on western countries. Most studies showed low awareness of CDR and mixed or positive attitudes towards different methods, he found.
He also outlined the main factors that affect peoples’ opinions of CDR, including the perceived “naturalness” of the method, trust in institutions and perceived risks and benefits of each method.
In the final session of the conference, former Conservative MP and chair of the COP26 climate summit Alok Sharma addressed the attendees. He said that “governments are not acting quickly enough” to tackle CO2 emissions, adding:
“I think that we need to be doing everything very quickly. I don’t think there is some sort of divide between trying to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and doing more in terms of renewables…The pace isn’t fast enough.”
Film director and producer Leila Conners also spoke to conference attendees about her upcoming documentary Legion 44, which focuses on CDR technologies.
This is part of her film trilogy that also included the 11th Hour, a documentary featuring actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Speaking to Carbon Brief about the range of discussions at the four-day conference, Dr Steve Smith said the discourse has changed since the first negative CO2 emissions conference in 2018. He told Carbon Brief:
“There’s a wider range of methods being looked at and a broader range of disciplines being brought to bear to look at this issue…Policymakers in particular are starting to move on this issue.”
Smith noted that in future, countries “may well need a lot of carbon removal as well as cutting emissions”. He added:
“For me, it’s not really emphasising just the trees or just the technologies. But we have a range of options and we should be exploring all of them at the moment.”
The next negative CO2 emissions conference will be held in Vienna, Austria in 2026.
The post Negative emissions: Scientists debate role of CO2 removal in tackling climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Negative emissions: Scientists debate role of CO2 removal in tackling climate change
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions to set new record in 2025, as land sink ‘recovers’
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise around 1.1% in 2025, reaching a record 38.1bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to the latest figures from the Global Carbon Project.
However, falling land-use emissions means that global CO2 emissions in 2025 will remain relatively unchanged compared to 2024 levels.
The 20th edition of the annual Global Carbon Budget report, published today, also finds that the land carbon sink – the portion of human-caused CO2 emissions absorbed by plants and soils – appears to have recovered to its pre-El Niño strength after two unusually weak years.
However, research published alongside the report by the same team also suggests that climate change has caused a long-term decline in land and ocean carbon sinks, with sinks being about 15% weaker over the past decade than they would have been without climate impacts.
The study, published in Nature, finds that the decline of carbon sinks has contributed about 8% to the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1960.
The 2025 Global Carbon Budget report also estimates that:
- Emissions in China and India are projected to grow much less in 2025 compared to the past decade, while emissions in the US and EU are projected to grow this year after years of decline.
- Global CO2 emissions from land-use change are expected to decrease by nearly 10% in 2025, driven by reductions in deforestation and forest degradation in South America.
- Total CO2 emissions – fossil and land use – have grown more slowly over the past decade (0.3% per year on average) compared to the previous decade (1.9% per year).
- The remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5C is virtually exhausted and is equivalent to only four years of current emissions. Carbon budgets to limit warming to 1.7C and 2C would similarly be used up in 12 and 25 years, respectively.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 425.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2025, 2.3ppm above 2023 and 52% above pre-industrial levels.
(For detailed coverage of previous editions of the report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage for 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Global emissions remain flat
The Global Carbon Budget (GCB) finds that total global CO2 emissions in 2025 – including those from fossil fuels and land use – are projected to remain approximately flat at 42.2GtCO2, falling by a negligible -0.04% compared to last year.
This means 2025 is effectively tied with 2024 as the highest global CO2 emissions on record.
Flat total CO2 emissions in 2025 reflect a combination of continued rising emissions from fossil fuel and industry and declining emissions from land-use change. Fossil CO2 emissions rose 1.1% to 38.1GtCO2, while land-use emissions declined by -9.8% to 4.1GtCO2 (albeit with large uncertainties).
The figure below shows the 2025 global CO2 emissions update (red solid line) alongside 2024 (dark blue dotted), 2023 (mid blue dotted) 2022 (light blue dotted), 2021 (light grey dotted) and 2020 (dark grey dotted). The shaded area indicates the uncertainty around the new 2025 budget.
(Each year, the GCB is updated to include the latest data as well as improvements to modelling sources and sinks, resulting in some year-to-year revisions to the historical record.)
The 2025 figures are notably higher than those in the prior five GCB reports, reflecting an upward revision in historical land-use emissions. (This is discussed in more detail in the land-use emissions section below.)
Total global CO2 emissions have notably flattened in the past decade (2014-25), growing at only 0.3% per year compared to the 1.9% rate of growth during the prior decade (2004-13) and the longer-term average growth rate of 1.6% over 1959-2014.
This apparent flattening is due to declining land-use emissions compensating for continued – but slow – increases in fossil CO2 emissions. Fossil emissions grew around 0.2GtCO2 per year over the past decade, while land-use emissions decreased by a comparable amount.
However, despite the emissions plateau, there is still no sign of the rapid and deep decrease in CO2 emissions needed to reach net-zero and stabilise global temperatures in-line with the Paris Agreement temperature goal.
If global emissions remain at current levels, the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C (with a 50% chance) will be rapidly exhausted.
(The carbon budget is the total amount of CO2 that scientists estimate can be emitted if warming is to be kept below a particular temperature threshold. Earlier this year, the Indicators of Global Climate Change report estimated the remaining carbon budget had declined by three-quarters between the start of 2020 and the start of 2025.)
With human-caused global warming sitting at around 1.36C above pre-industrial levels in 2024, the remaining budget for 1.5C is 170GtCO2, equivalent to four years of current emissions.
The GCB report finds that the remaining carbon budgets to limit warming to 1.7C and 2C have been reduced to 525GtCO2 (12 years at current emissions levels) and 1,055GtCO2 (25 years), respectively.
Global fossil CO2 emissions also grew more slowly in the past decade (0.8% per year) compared to the previous decade (2.1%). This was driven by the continued decarbonisation of energy systems – including a shift from burning coal to gas and replacing fossil fuels with renewables – as well as slightly weaker global economic growth during the past decade.
The figure below breaks down global emissions (dark blue line) in the 2025 budget into fossil (mid blue) and land-use (light blue) components. Fossil CO2 emissions represent the bulk of total global emissions in recent years, accounting for approximately 90% of emissions in 2025 (compared to 10% for land use). This represents a large change from the first half of the 20th century, when land-use emissions were approximately the same as fossil emissions.
Global fossil emissions include CO2 emitted from burning coal, oil and gas, as well as the production of cement. However, to determine total fossil emissions, the Global Carbon Budget also subtracts the cement carbonation sink – CO2 slowly absorbed by cement once it is exposed to the air – from fossil emissions.
Global emissions can also be expressed on a per-capita basis, as shown in the figure below.
While it is ultimately total global emissions that matter for the Earth’s climate – and a global per-capita figure glosses over a lot of variation among, and within, countries – it is noteworthy that global per-capita fossil emissions peaked in 2012 and have been slightly declining in the years since.
Land-use emissions continue downward trend
Global land-use emissions stem from deforestation, forest degradation, loss of peatlands and harvesting trees for wood. They averaged around 5.0GtCO2 over the past decade (2015-24) and the Global Carbon Budget provides an initial projection for 2025 of 4.1GtCO2.
This represents a 0.5GtCO2 decrease in land-use emissions relative to 2024. The GCB report suggests that this was largely driven by a combination of reductions in deforestation and forest degradation in South America and by the end of the dry 2023-24 El Niño conditions.
Overall, land-use emissions have decreased by around 32% compared to their average in the 2000s, with a particularly large drop in the past decade. This decline is statistically significant and is due both to decreasing deforestation and increasing levels of reforestation and afforestation globally.
Three countries – Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – collectively contribute approximately 57% of the global land-use emissions. In the past, China has been a meaningful contributor to land-use emissions, but in recent years its land-use emissions have turned net-negative as more trees have been planted than cut down.
The figure below shows changes in emissions over time in these countries, as well as land-use emissions in the rest of the world (grey).
Historical land-use emissions have been revised upward in the 2025 GCB report compared to prior estimates. This reflects a combination of two factors:
- The discontinuation of one of the four bookkeeping models that GCB has historically relied on for land-use emissions estimates. This model tended to show lower land-use emissions than the others.
- The inclusion of the impacts from CO2 fertilisation on global biomass densities. Because forests have higher biomass densities now than in the past, due to increasing CO2, this tends to increase the estimate of land-use emissions for recent years.
Fossil-fuel CO2 hits record highs
Global emissions of fossil CO2 – including coal, oil, gas and cement – increased by around 1.1% in 2025, relative to 2024, with an uncertainty range of 0.2-2.2%. This represents a new record high and surpasses the prior record set in 2024.
The figure below shows global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, divided into emissions from major emitting countries including China (dark blue shading), the US (mid blue), the EU (light blue), India (light blue) and the remainder of the world (grey).
China represents 32% of global CO2 emissions today. Its 2025 emissions are projected to increase by a relatively small 0.4% (with an uncertainty range of -0.9% to 2%), driven by a small rise in emissions from coal (0.3%), a modest rise in gas (1.3%) and a larger rise in oil (2.1%).
Given the uncertainty range, a decrease in Chinese emissions is also a possibility, but this will not be confirmed until the full 2025 data is available.
Similarly, recent analysis for Carbon Brief found that China’s emissions were “finely balanced between a small fall or rise” in 2025. However, it said that a drop in the full-year total became more likely after a 3% decline in September. (The Global Carbon Project estimates are based on data covering January through to August, which point towards a small rise in 2025.)
Whether China’s emissions see small rise or fall in 2025, the outcome will be due to moderate growth in energy consumption combined with an extraordinary growth in renewable power generation. This would represent the second year in a row where Chinese emissions growth was well below the average rate over the past decade.
The US represents 13% of global emissions and emissions in 2025 are projected to increase by 1.9% (-0.2 to +4.1%) compared with 2024. This marks a reversal from recent trends in declining CO2 emissions.
The projected growth of emissions in the US is likely driven by a combination of three factors: a colder start to the year after a mild 2024, which led to greater heating requirements, higher gas prices, which led to more coal being used in power generation, as well as an increase in total demand for electricity.
US emissions from coal are expected to increase by a substantial 7.5% in 2025, emissions from both oil and gas by a more modest 1.1% and emissions from cement to fall by -8.0%.
While policies enacted by the current US administration may increase CO2 emissions going forward, their impact on national emissions levels in 2025 were likely relatively modest compared to other factors.
India represents 8% of global emissions. In 2025, its emissions are projected to increase by 1.4% (-0.3% to +3.1%) on 2024 levels, significantly below recent trends.
An early monsoon with the highest-ever May rainfall substantially reduced cooling requirements in May and June, the hottest months of the year. Strong growth or renewables – particularly solar – has also helped limit the growth of Indian emissions.
Indian emissions from coal are expected to grow 1.7%, with oil growing 0.1%, gas shrinking by -6.4% and cement growing by 9.9%.
The EU represents 6% of global emissions. Its emissions are projected to increase by 0.4% in 2025, with an uncertainty range of -2.1 to +2.8%. This represents a divergence from a past decline in emissions (albeit with large uncertainties).
EU emissions from coal are expected to decline by -0.3%, whereas emissions from oil and gas are projected to increase by 0.6% and 0.9%, respectively. Cement emissions are expected to fall by -4.1%.
The increase in EU emissions is in part from weather-related low hydropower and wind generation which – despite increases in solar – have led to an increase in electricity generation from gas. In addition, a relatively cold February led to increased use of natural gas for space heating.
International aviation and shipping (included in the “rest of world” in the chart above) are responsible for 3% of global emissions. They are projected to increase by 6.8% for aviation, but remain flat for international shipping. This year will be the first time that aviation emissions have exceeded pre-Covid levels.
The rest of the world (excluding aviation) represents 38% of global emissions. Emissions are expected to grow by 1.1% in 2025 (ranging from -1.1% to +3.3%), with increases in emissions from coal (1%), oil (0.5%), gas (1.8%) and cement (2.4%).
The total emissions for each year over 2022-25, as well as the countries and regions that were responsible for the changes in absolute emissions, are shown in the figure below.
Annual emissions for 2022, 2023, 2024 and estimates for 2025 are shown by the black bars. The smaller bars show the change in emissions between each set of years, broken down by country or region – the US (dark blue), EU (mid blue), China (light blue), India (pale blue) and the rest of the world (grey). Negative values show reductions in emissions, while positive values reflect emission increases.
The US represented a large part of the rise in global fossil-fuel emissions in 2025. US emissions increases over 2024-25 contributed about 40% of the total global increase – more than the EU, China and India contributions combined.
The Global Carbon Project notes that emissions have declined over the past decade (2015-24) in 35 nations, which collectively account for 27% of global emissions. This is up from 18 countries during the prior decade (2005-14).
The decrease in emissions in those countries comes despite continued domestic economic growth and represents a long-term “decoupling” of CO2 emissions and the economy.
The carbon intensity of energy has consistently decreased over the past decade in China, the US, the EU – and, to a lesser extent, globally.
However, peaking CO2 emissions requires that the rate of decarbonisation exceeds the growth in energy demand. This has happened in some regions, including the US and EU, but not yet globally.
Modest growth in emissions from coal, oil, gas and cement
Global fossil-fuel emissions primarily result from the combustion of coal, oil and gas.
In 2025, coal is responsible for more emissions than any other fossil fuel, representing approximately 42% of global fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. Oil is the second largest contributor at 33% of fossil CO2, while gas comes in at 21%.
The production of cement is responsible for around 3.8% of global emissions, but this is reduced to 1.9% once the carbonation sink – the drawdown of atmospheric CO2 by concrete – is taken into account.
These percentages reflect both the amount of each fossil fuel consumed globally, but also differences in CO2 intensities. Coal results in the most CO2 emitted per unit of heat or energy produced, followed by oil and gas.
The figure below shows global CO2 emissions from different fuels over time, covering coal (dark blue), oil (mid blue) and gas (light blue), as well as cement production (pale blue) and other sources (grey).
While coal emissions increased rapidly in the mid-2000s, they have largely flattened since 2013. However, coal use increased significantly in 2021 and then more modestly in the subsequent four years.
Global emissions from coal increased by 0.8% in 2025 compared to 2024, while oil emissions increased 1.0% and gas emissions increased by 1.3%.
Despite setting a new record this year, global coal use is only 6% above 2013 levels – a full 13 years ago. By contrast, during the 2000s, global coal use grew at a rate of around 4% every single year.
The figure below shows the total emissions for each year over 2022-25 (black bars), as well as the absolute change in emissions for each fuel between years.
Global oil emissions were suppressed for a few years after the 2020, but rebounded to pre-pandemic levels as of 2024 and have continued to grow in 2025.
This reflects that, despite falling sales of internal combustion engine vehicles, not enough electric vehicles (EVs) have yet been sold to result in peak oil demand.
The global carbon budget
Every year, the Global Carbon Project provides an estimate of the overall “global carbon budget”. This is based on estimates of the release of CO2 through human activity and its uptake by the oceans and land, with the remainder adding to atmospheric concentrations of the gas.
(This differs from the commonly used term “remaining carbon budget”, which refers to the amount of CO2 that can be released while keeping warming below global limits of 1.5 or 2C.)
The most recent budget, including estimated values for 2025, is shown in the figure below.
Values above zero represent sources of CO2 – from fossil fuels and industry (dark blue shading) and land use (mid blue) – while values below zero represent carbon sinks that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Any CO2 emissions that are not absorbed by the oceans (light grey) or land vegetation (mid grey) accumulate in the atmosphere (dark grey). In addition, a dashed black line is shown to represent the expected sum of sinks based on estimated emissions.
Over the past decade (2015-24), the world’s oceans have taken up approximately 29% of total human-caused emissions, or around 11.8GtCO2 per year.
The ocean CO2 sink has been relatively flat since 2014 after growing rapidly over the prior decades, reflecting the flattening of global emissions during that period.
This estimate for carbon sinks has been revised up from 26% in prior versions of the GCB, reflecting a major update to carbon budgets driven by new data and modelling of carbon sink behavior.
The land sink takes up around 21% of global emissions, or 8.7GtCO2 per year on average over the past decade – discussed in more detail in the section below. This is down from 29% in prior budgets.
The atmosphere continues to accumulate the bulk of human-caused CO2 emissions, with about 49% going into the atmosphere on average over the past decade – a rate of 20.4GtCO2 per year.
The growth rate of atmospheric CO2 in 2025 is expected to be around 2.3ppm, which is a bit below the decadal average rate of 2.6ppm over the past decade (2015-24). This is well below the record-setting rise of 3.7ppm in 2024, which was primarily driven by the effect of the 2023-24 El Niño conditions weakening the land sink.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are set to reach an annual average of 425.7ppm in 2025, representing an increase of 52% above pre-industrial levels of 280ppm.
There remains an unusual imbalance in the carbon budget in 2024, where the sum of the sinks is notably larger than estimated emissions. This can be seen in the figure above, where the dashed line is below the shaded area.
Budget imbalances are not unprecedented – there are large uncertainties in both emissions data and sink estimates. But the rise in the amount of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere in 2024 is larger than would be expected based on emissions.
There are a number of potential explanations for this 2024 imbalance. The land cover data for 2024 is not yet complete and it is possible that some fire emissions data might be missing from the record. This might result in either higher land-use emissions or lower land sinks than currently estimated.
Alternatively, it could be due to the CO2 growth rate – captured by surface stations managed by the US National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) – being slightly high. CO2 records for 2024 from these stations are higher than those obtained from satellite-based sensors, though it remains unclear which provides the most accurate measurement.
A declining, but not collapsing, land sink
After an usually weak land carbon sink in 2023, there were a number of media articles about its potential collapse.
For example, in October 2024, the Guardian wrote that “the sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating”.
The truth is a bit more complicated. While the impending collapse of the land carbon sink has been greatly exaggerated, there is growing evidence of a long-term weakening of both the land and ocean carbon sinks due to human activity.
And while the land sink has recovered to its pre-El Niño strength in 2025, aided by relatively low global fire CO2 emissions, it will continue to gradually weaken as global temperatures rise. This is not unexpected – scientists have long foreseen a weaker carbon sink in a warmer world.
A weaker land sink will contribute to higher global temperatures in the future as more CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use change will accumulate in the atmosphere.
The figure below shows the percentage of human emissions absorbed by the land sink in every year since 1959, with a recovery upwards in 2025 after two relatively low years.
In a study published in Nature alongside the release of the 2025 Global Carbon Budget, the same team of researchers provide a detailed estimate of exactly how the land and ocean sinks have changed as a result of human activity.
The research finds that the land and ocean sinks are 25% smaller and 7% smaller, respectively, than they would have been without the effects of climate change over 2015-24.
This amounts to a nearly 20% reduction in the efficacy of current global carbon sinks – that is, both the land and ocean – and a 15% reduction compared to how large they would be without the effects of climate change.
The figure below, from the new paper, shows the impact of climate change on the ocean sink (blue), the land sink (green) and atmospheric CO2 concentrations (grey) since 1960.
The weakening of carbon sinks due to human activity has led to an increase of atmospheric CO2 of more than 8ppm since 1960. The combined effects of climate change and deforestation have turned tropical forests in south-east Asia and in large parts of South America from CO2 sinks to sources.
And these sinks will likely continue to weaken as long as atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise and the world continues to warm. There are a wide range of estimates of carbon cycle feedbacks among climate models, but a large carbon cycle feedback could result in a few tenths of a degree of future warming.
The post Analysis: Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions to set new record in 2025, as land sink ‘recovers’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions to set new record in 2025, as land sink ‘recovers’
Greenhouse Gases
IEA: Fossil-fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless ‘stated policies’ are abandoned
The world’s fossil-fuel use is still on track to peak before 2030, despite a surge in political support for coal, oil and gas, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2025, published during the opening days of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, shows coal at or close to a peak, with oil set to follow around 2030 and gas by 2035, based on the stated policy intentions of the world’s governments.
Under the same assumptions, the IEA says that clean-energy use will surge, as nuclear power rises 39% by 2035, solar by 344% and wind by 178%.
Still, the outlook has some notable shifts since last year, with coal use revised up by around 6% in the near term, oil seeing a shallower post-peak decline and gas plateauing at higher levels.
This means that the IEA expects global warming to reach 2.5C this century if “stated policies” are implemented as planned, up marginally from 2.4C in last year’s outlook.
In addition, after pressure from the Trump administration in the US, the IEA has resurrected its “current policies scenario”, which – effectively – assumes that governments around the world abandon their stated intentions and only policies already set in legislation are continued.
If this were to happen, the IEA warns, global warming would reach 2.9C by 2100, as oil and gas demand would continue to rise and the decline in coal use would proceed at a slower rate.
This year’s outlook also includes a pathway that limits warming to 1.5C in 2100, but says that this would only be possible after a period of “overshoot”, where temperature rise peaks at 1.65C.
The IEA will publish its “announced pledges scenario” at a later date, to illustrate the impact of new national climate pledges being implemented on time and in full.
(See Carbon Brief’s coverage of previous IEA world energy outlooks from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)
World energy outlook
The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is published every autumn. It is regarded as one of the most influential annual contributions to the understanding of energy and emissions trends.
The outlook explores a range of scenarios, representing different possible futures for the global energy system. These are developed using the IEA’s “global energy and climate model”.
The latest report stresses that “none of [these scenarios] should be regarded as a forecast”.
However, this year’s outlook marks a major shift in emphasis between the scenarios – and it reintroduces a pathway where oil and gas demand continues to rise for many decades.
This pathway is named the “current policies scenario” (CPS), which assumes that governments abandon their planned policies, leaving only those that are already set in legislation.
If the world followed this path, then global temperatures would reach 2.9C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and would be “set to keep rising from there”, the IEA says.
The CPS was part of the annual outlook until 2020, when the IEA said that it was “difficult to imagine” such a pathway “prevailing in today’s circumstances”.
It has been resurrected following heavy pressure from the US, which is a major funder of the IEA that accounts for 14% of the agency’s budget.
For example, in July Politico reported “a ratcheted-up US pressure campaign” and “months of public frustrations with the IEA from top Trump administration officials”. It noted:
“Some Republicans say the IEA has discouraged investment in fossil fuels by publishing analyses that show near-term peaks in global demand for oil and gas.”
The CPS is the first scenario to be discussed in detail in the report, appearing in chapter three. The CPS similarly appears first in Annex A, the data tables for the report.
The second scenario is the “stated policies scenario” (STEPS), featured in chapter four of this year’s outlook. Here, the outlook also includes policies that governments say they intend to bring forward and that the IEA judges as likely to be implemented in practice.
In this world, global warming would reach 2.5C by 2100 – up marginally from the 2.4C expected in the 2024 edition of the outlook.
Beyond the STEPS and the CPS, the outlook includes two further scenarios.
One is the “net-zero emissions by 2050” (NZE) scenario, which illustrates how the world’s energy system would need to change in order to limit warming in 2100 to 1.5C.
The NZE was first floated in the 2020 edition of the report and was then formally featured in 2021.
The report notes that, unlike in previous editions, this scenario would see warming peak at more than 1.6C above pre-industrial temperatures, before returning to 1.5C by the end of the century.
This means it would include a high level of temporary “overshoot” of the 1.5C target. The IEA explains that this results from the “reality of persistently high emissions in recent years”. It adds:
“In addition to very rapid progress with the transformation of the energy sector, bringing the temperature rise back down below 1.5C by 2100 also requires widespread deployment of CO2 removal technologies that are currently unproven at large scale.”
Finally, the outlook includes a new scenario where everyone in the world is able to gain access to electricity by 2035 and to clean cooking by 2040, named “ACCESS”.
While the STEPS appears second in the running order of the report, it is mentioned slightly more frequently than the CPS, as shown in the figure below. The CPS is a close second, however, whereas the IEA’s 1.5C pathway (NZE) receives a declining level of attention.
US critics of the IEA have presented its stated policies scenario as “disconnected from reality”, in contrast to what they describe as the “likely scenario” of “business as usual”.
Yet the current policies scenario is far from a “business-as-usual” pathway. The IEA says this explicitly in an article published ahead of the outlook:
“The CPS might seem like a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario, but this terminology can be misleading in an energy system where new technologies are already being deployed at scale, underpinned by robust economics and mature, existing policy frameworks. In these areas, ‘business as usual’ would imply continuing the current process of change and, in some cases, accelerating it.”
In order to create the current policies scenario, where oil and gas use continues to surge into the future, the IEA therefore has to make more pessimistic assumptions about barriers to the uptake of new technologies and about the willingness of governments to row back on their plans. It says:
“The CPS…builds on a narrow reading of today’s policy settings…assuming no change, even where governments have indicated their intention to do so.”
This is not a scenario of “business as usual”. Instead, it is a scenario where countries around the world follow US president Donald Trump in dismantling their plans to shift away from fossil fuels.
More specifically, the current policies scenario assumes that countries around the world renege on their policy commitments and fail to honour their climate pledges.
For example, it assumes that Japan and South Korea fail to implement their latest national electricity plans, that China fails to continue its power-market reforms and abandons its provincial targets for clean power, that EU countries fail to meet their coal phase-out pledges and that US states such as California fail to extend their clean-energy targets.
Similarly, it assumes that Brazil, Turkey and India fail to implement their greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (ETS) as planned and that China fails to expand its ETS to other industries.
The scenario also assumes that the EU, China, India, Australia, Japan and many others fail to extend or continue strengthening regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances, as well as those relating to the fuel-economy standards for new vehicles.
In contrast to the portrayal of the stated policies scenario as blindly assuming that all pledges will be met, the IEA notes that it does not give a free pass to aspirational targets. It says:
“[T]argets are not automatically assumed to be met; the prospects and timing for their realisation are subject to an assessment of relevant market, infrastructure and financial constraints…[L]ike the CPS, the STEPS does not assume that aspirational goals, such as those included in the Paris Agreement, are achieved.”
Only in the “announced pledges scenario” (APS) does the IEA assume that countries meet all of their climate pledges on time and full – regardless of how credible they are.
The APS does not appear in this year’s report, presumably because many countries missed the deadlines to publish new climate pledges ahead of COP30.
The IEA says it will publish its APS, assessing the impact of the new pledges, “once there is a more complete picture of these commitments”.
Fossil-fuel peak
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the IEA’s outlook for fossil fuels under the stated policies scenario, which it has described as “a mirror to the plans of today’s policymakers”.
In 2020, the agency said that prevailing policy conditions pointed towards a “structural” decline in global coal demand, but that it was too soon to declare a peak in oil or gas demand.
By 2021, it said global fossil-fuel use could peak as soon as 2025, but only if all countries got on track to meet their climate goals. Under stated policies, it expected fossil-fuel use to hit a plateau from the late 2020s onwards, declining only marginally by 2050.
There was a dramatic change in 2022, when it said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting global energy crisis had “turbo-charged” the shift away from fossil fuels.
As a result, it said at the time that it expected a peak in demand for each of the fossil fuels. Coal “within a few years”, oil “in the mid-2030s” and gas ”by the end of the decade”.
This outlook sharpened further in 2023 and, by 2024, it was saying that each of the fossil fuels would see a peak in global demand before 2030.
This year’s report notes that “some formal country-level [climate] commitments have waned”, pointing to the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement.
The report says the “new direction” in the US is among “major new policies” in 48 countries. The other changes it lists include Brazil’s “energy transition acceleration programme”, Japan’s new plan for 2040 and the EU’s recently adopted 2040 climate target.
Overall, the IEA data still points to peaks in demand for coal, oil and gas under the stated policies scenario, as shown in the figure below.
Alongside this there is a surge in clean technologies, with renewables overtaking oil to become the world’s largest source of energy – not just electricity – by the early 2040s.
In this year’s outlook under stated policies, the IEA sees global coal demand as already being at – or very close to – a definitive peak, as the chart above shows.
Coal then enters a structural decline, where demand for the fuel is displaced by cheaper alternatives, particularly renewable sources of electricity.
The IEA reiterates that the cost of solar, wind and batteries has respectively fallen by 90%, 70% and 90% since 2010, with further declines of 10-40% expected by 2035.
(The report notes that household energy spending would be lower under the more ambitious NZE scenario than under stated policies, despite the need for greater investment.)
However, this year’s outlook has coal use in 2030 coming in some 6% higher than expected last year, although it ultimately declines to similar levels by 2050.
For oil, the agency’s data still points to a peak in demand this decade, as electric vehicles (EVs) and more efficient combustion engines erode the need for the fuel in road transport.
While this sees oil demand in 2030 reaching similar levels to what the IEA expected last year, the post-peak decline is slightly less marked in the latest outlook, ending some 5% higher in 2050.
The biggest shift compared with last year is for gas, where the IEA suggests that global demand will keep rising until 2035, rather than peaking by 2030.
Still, the outlook has gas demand in 2030 being only 7% higher than expected last year. It notes:
“Long-term natural gas demand growth is kept lower than in recent decades by the expanding deployment of renewables, efficiency gains and electrification of end-uses.”
In terms of clean energy, the outlook sees nuclear power output growing to 39% above 2024 levels by 2035 and doubling by 2050. Solar grows nearly four-fold by 2035 and nearly nine-fold by 2050, while wind power nearly triples and quadruples over the same periods.
Notably, the IEA sees strong growth of clean-energy technologies, even in the current policies scenario. Here, renewables would still become the world’s largest energy source before 2050.
This is despite the severe headwinds assumed in this scenario, including EVs never increasing from their current low share of sales in India or the US.
The CPS would see oil and gas use continuing to rise, with demand for oil reaching 11% above current levels by 2050 and gas climbing 31%, even as renewables nearly triple.
This means that coal use would still decline, falling to a fifth below current levels by 2050.
Finally, while the IEA considers the prospect of global coal demand continuing to rise rather than falling as expected, it gives this idea short shrift. It explains:
“A growth story for coal over the coming decades cannot entirely be ruled out but it would fly in the face of two crucial structural trends witnessed in recent years: the rise of renewable sources of power generation, and the shift in China away from an especially coal-intensive model of growth and infrastructure development. As such, sustained growth for coal demand appears highly unlikely.”
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IEA: Fossil-fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless ‘stated policies’ are abandoned
For the first time in the history of COP climate summits, the US – the world’s largest historical emitter – has not sent a delegation to the talks.
Back in January, newly inaugurated US president Donald Trump signed a letter to the UN to trigger the start of a US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for a second time.
Although this process is not yet complete, the White House confirmed earlier this month that no “high-level officials” would be attending COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
The US joins Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino as the only countries not registering a delegation for the summit, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis of the provisional lists of delegates published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Despite these absences, more than 56,000 delegates have signed up to COP30, provisionally placing the summit as one of the largest in COP history.
This is despite the run-up to the negotiations being dogged by reports of a shortage of beds and “sky-high” accommodation costs.
Brazil even offered free cabins on cruise ships moored in Belém to delegations from low-income nations who were otherwise unable to attend.
According to the provisional figures, 193 countries, plus the European Union, have registered a delegation for the summit.
Unsurprisingly, the largest delegation comes from COP30 hosts Brazil, with 3,805 people registered.
This is followed, in order, by China, Nigeria, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This year also sees the largest number of “virtual” delegates, with more than 5,000 people signed up to attend the talks online.
Party delegations
With 56,118 delegates registered, COP30 is provisionally the second-largest COP in history, behind only COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This is the provisional total, based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. At recent COPs, the final total is at least 10,000 lower, which would drop COP30 down to the fourth largest.
(The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has closed.)
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP30 compare to the final totals in past COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP30 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 11,519 delegates – the fourth largest behind the past three COPs.
(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers approximately doubles the total for party representatives to 23,509.
US no-show
Overall, of the 198 parties to the UNFCCC, 194 have registered delegations for COP30.
The most notable absentee is the US, which has been present at every other COP in history – even throughout Donald Trump’s first presidency.
On average, the US sends a delegation of around 100 people, typically making it one of the larger groups at the talks.
The absent parties – Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino – have been more sporadic attendees at past COPs.
Despite reports of a “logistical nightmare” hosting a COP summit in the Amazon, there has been no drop-off in the number of countries registering delegations for COP30.
In addition to hotel rooms and rental properties in Belém, beds have been made available on cruise ships, in converted shipping containers and in motels that Reuters primly described as being typically “aimed at amorous couples”.
Reports suggested that many developing nations considered scaling back their presence at COP30, with smaller delegations or attendees only coming for a few days.
While the average party delegation size of 59 (excluding overflows) is lower than the previous two COPs, it is similar to the average in COP26 in Glasgow and COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP30. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
The largest delegation comes from host country Brazil, with 3,805 people registered. China (789) and Nigeria (749) follow with the second- and third-largest, respectively.
Making up the rest of the top 10 are Indonesia (566), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (556), France (530), Chad (528), Australia (494), Tanzania (465) and Japan (461).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 210.
(It is worth noting that some countries – such as Brazil – allocate some of their party badges to NGOs, which can artificially inflate the size of their official delegation.)
The smallest delegation is the one person registered to represent Nicaragua. There are five delegations of two people (North Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Slovakia).
Ahead of COP30, Latvia's climate minister, told Reuters that the country had asked if its negotiators could dial into the summit by video call. However, Latvia does not appear to have registered any delegates to attend virtually.
In total, 40 parties registered virtual delegates. Party totals are all in single figures apart from the Philippines (31), Costa Rica (21) and Turkey (16).
Changing gender balance
The UNFCCC’s participant lists typically provide a title – such as Mr, Ms, Sr or Sra – for each registered delegate. In the past, this has allowed Carbon Brief to work out the balance of men to women in the delegations that each country has sent to a COP.
(This analysis always carries the caveat that the titles are designated by UNFCCC and not by Carbon Brief. In addition, Carbon Brief recognises that gender is not best categorised using a binary “man” or “woman” label and appreciates that the UNFCCC’s lists may not be wholly accurate.)
Overall, the COP30 provisional list suggests an average gender balance of party delegations of 57% men to 43% women.
As the chart below shows, this makes COP29 the most balanced COP in history. For consistency, the COP28, COP29 and COP30 figures only include those on party badges, not overflow ones.
(Note: Since COP28 last year, the UNFCCC has also used titles that do not indicate gender – such as Dr, Prof, Ambassador and Honourable. Therefore, for this analysis, these non-gendered titles – which make up 1% of all the people at COP30, for example – have not been included.)
There are four party delegations this year that are all men – Tuvalu (three delegates), Niger (three), North Korea (two) and Nicaragua (one) – and one that is all women (Nauru, with five delegates).
The full list of COP30 party delegation sizes can be found here.
(For previous COPs, see Carbon Brief’s delegate analysis for COP21, COP23, COP24, COP25, COP26, COP27, COP28, COP29)
The post Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP30? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP30?
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