Global carbon-dioxide emissions from burning of fossil fuels and production of cement reached a high of 35.3 billion tonnes in 2013, mainly due to the continuing steady increase in energy use in emerging economies such as India, a new report says.
Brazil (6.2 per cent), India (4.4 per cent), China (4.2 per cent) and Indonesia (2.3 per cent) reported a sharp rise in emissions of the greenhouse gas that year.
The global emissions, however, increased at a notably slower rate of 2 per cent than the average yearly 3.8 per cent since 2003. The slowdown, which began in 2012, signals a further decoupling of global emissions and economic growth, mainly reflecting the lower emissions growth rate of China, says the annual “Trends in global CO emissions” released by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
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In the European Union, emissions continued to fall — by 1.4 per cent in 2013.
The much lower increase in emissions in China — 4.2 per cent in 2013 and 3.4 per cent in 2012 — was primarily due to a decline in electricity and fuel demand from the basic materials industry, and aided by an increase in renewable energy and improvements in energy efficiency.
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“With the present annual growth rate, China has returned to the lower annual growth rates that it experienced before its economic growth started to accelerate in 2003, when its annual carbon dioxide emissions increased on average by 12 per cent a year,” the report says.