A climate report projects that the world’s carbon emissions are on track to hit an all-time high this year, despite major advances in green tech and adoption of measures to curb pollution from the use of fossil fuels.
That’s from this year’s assessment by the Global Carbon Budget (GCB), an initiative to track all the CO2 emissions across the planet, emanating from vehicle exhausts, producing cement, and everything in between each year. It estimates that 38.1 billion tons of emissions will be released by the end of 2025, amounting for a rise of 1.1% from last year – and hitting a record high.
Where are these emissions coming from? All types of fossil fuels, from coal to natural gas to oil, contributed to a rise in emissions this year.
The Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming well below 2 °C sets the budget for the additional CO2 that we can afford to add to our atmosphere each year with this temperature target in mind (our carbon budget, if you will).
The troubling context this provides is the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5 °C is “virtually exhausted.”
The Global Carbon Budget also looks at carbon sinks – systems that absorb more CO2 from the air than they release, like forests and oceans. Its annual report (the 20th edition so far) was presented along with a paper in the journal Nature that looked at the weakening impact of climate change on Earth’s climate sinks.
“With CO2 emissions still increasing, keeping global warming below 1.5°C is no longer plausible,” explained Exeter’s Global Systems Institute’s Professor Pierre Friedlingstein, who led the study. “The remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C, 170 billion tons of CO2, will be gone before 2030 at current emission rate. We estimate that climate change is now reducing the combined land and ocean sinks – a clear signal from Planet Earth that we need to dramatically reduce emissions.”
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization came to a similar conclusion about the previous year too, noting in its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin last month that global CO2 emissions had hit a record high for 2024.
Emissions from the US (13% of the global total) and the European Union (6%) are expected to grow above recent trends by 1.9% and 0.4% respectively. That’s due to a ramp up in liquefied natural gas exports, increased coal use, and a higher demand for electricity in the US, and lower hydro and wind power output across Europe.
Talk about a punch to the gut.
Candidly speaking, I’ve been optimistically covering renewable energy technologies, as well as initiatives and innovations to reduce emissions in ammonia and cement production for the past year, and was hoping to learn we were making positive strides towards achieving climate goals. It turns out there’s still a ton of work to be done, and it still looks like we’ve got quite the uphill battle ahead of us, given these data points.
That said, the GCB points out that it’s not all doom and gloom. There are a couple of positive findings from around the globe.
China, the world’s largest emitter of CO2 (32% of Earth’s total), has slowed emissions growth massively. So while its figures show a 0.4% increase in emissions, that’s a lot less than year-on-year growth over the past decade. The same goes for India, which accounts for 8% of global emissions; it’s projected to see an increase of 1.4%, which is below recent trends.
Plus, 35 countries have reduced their CO2 emissions over the past decade, while also growing their economies. So things could have been worse, but thanks to international policies and national efforts to reduce reliance and use of fossil fuels, we’ve seen some movement in the right direction. It’s just not been enough given the urgency to hit our temperature goals.
Global Carbon Project 2025
It’s worth noting, however, that this list of countries also includes the US, which was flagged as having increased emissions in the past year (meaning it did well on a decade-long scale, but fared poorly when you consider just 2025). That means policymakers and environmental protection agencies need to work towards delivering results more consistently to bring about real change.
There’s plenty to be done yet if we’re to stabilize the climate around the world. Efforts to slow deforestation – including in the mighty carbon sink that is the Amazon rainforest – have helped, but most countries will have to make major adjustments to their energy production and consumption practices over the coming years.
You can find the full GCB report here, as well as details on the findings that go beyond what we’ve covered above in this PDF.
Source: Global Carbon Budget
