Håkon Kjøllmoen

Globally, calls for more substantial action on climate change are getting louder. In the US, Senators Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey have been pushing their Green New Deal, which proposes widespread decarbonisation. And on February 15, 2019, schoolchildren around the world walked out of their classes to protest widespread inaction on climate change.

These positive murmurings haven’t been matched by meaningful political action. Out of the 197 signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement – the global pledge to mitigate climate change – just 16 of them have passed laws to help them meet the carbon goals they signed up to.


But there might be a way forward – if governments can get their act together and pass laws that cut down emissions. That’s the breathtakingly obvious conclusion of a paper published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

“Countries that had the most policies around carbon dioxide emissions tended to be the countries which had the largest decreases in emissions,” says Corinne Le Quere, a professor of climatology at the University of East Anglia, and one of the lead authors on the paper. “Policies that were focused on the efficiency of energy usage in cars, and houses, for example, were linked to decreases in emissions in these countries.”

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It’s relatively simple to find out whether emissions are going up or down in absolute terms, but finding out the reason behind those changes is more of a challenge. To try and tease a signal out of the noise, the group of international researchers, carried out an analysis of the carbon emissions from eighteen countries which displayed signs of a peak, and then decline, in carbon dioxide emissions.

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Using data collected by the International Energy Agency, the researchers used information on national CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion between 2005 and 2015. In the 18 countries examined, the group found that emissions had decreased on average by 2.4 per cent per year. “We tried to look at what the recipe for success is across the countries,” says Le Quere. “So we examined the reasons why the emissions were going down, which were all physical factors.”

Researchers broke down country-level trends in emissions across four factors: energy use, fossil fuel market share, energy efficiency in fossil fuels, and the proportion of coal, oil and gas in the overall fossil fuel mix. The result? Lower emissions were driven by policies that encouraged wider use of renewables as well as a reduction in overall energy use.

There were also correlations between lower gross domestic product, and lower CO2 emissions – a relationship that environmental economists and researchers have been emphasising for many years. “When the GDP increases, it triggers a demand in energy,” says Le Quere. “The emissions increase is mostly in developing countries, and the demand for energy is growing very fast.”

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“Countries that peaked and declined their emissions since 2005 tend to do so by using less energy, and shifting to non-fossil energy production,” says Glen Peters, a research director at the Centre for International Climate Research who was also a co-author on the paper. “In practice, we found that more effective use of energy is an effective lever in reducing emissions.”


Even within legislation on energy, there are several different approaches countries can take. In order to simplify that relationship, the researchers split the policies into three groups – renewable energy, energy efficiency or climate change mitigation or adaptation – to identify if there was a type of policy that had a significant effect on emissions. Countries that saw declining emissions rates tended to have a greater number of policies on both energy efficiency and renewable energy than countries that have had steadily increasing emissions.

“Renewables, nuclear, fracking, coal tend to hog the headlines and the attention of policymakers,”says Charlie Wilson, a reader in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and another co-author of the paper. “But downsizing the energy system by reducing energy demand makes the scale of decarbonisation challenges much more manageable.”

The researchers emphasise that there has to be widespread policy support for energy efficiency and renewables in the future, if any country wants to stand a chance at tackling climate change. “Each country has its own story, and so it’s important to peel back the next layer, and see what specifically works,” says Peters. “We need to put more focus on using less energy across the economy, and that will make the decarbonisation challenge less daunting.”

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