Business closures. Travel restrictions. Working and learning from home. These and other dramatic responses to Covid-19 have caused sharp reductions in economic activity — and associated fossil fuel consumption — around the world.
Business closures. Travel restrictions. Working and learning from home. These and other dramatic responses to Covid-19 have caused sharp reductions in economic activity — and associated fossil fuel consumption — around the world. As a result, many nations are reporting significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for the year 2020, edging them a bit closer to meeting the initial emissions targets to which they committed under the Paris Agreement on climate change. While the pandemic may have accelerated progress toward these targets over the past year, will that trend continue through this decade and beyond?
According to a new study in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the answer to that question will depend, in part, on the pandemic’s long-term effect on economic activity and energy use around the world. To assess that impact, the study’s co-authors, all researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, compared two estimates of global economic activity through 2035: one projecting economic recession and recovery from Covid-19, the other forecasting economic growth had Covid-19 not occurred.
Assuming a return to pre-pandemic levels of employment by 2035, the study finds that Covid-19 produces a steep, 8.2 percent reduction in global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020, but only a 2 percent reduction in 2035. Assuming that Paris Agreement national climate targets through 2030 are fulfilled despite economic disruption, the lower GDP numbers result in a 3.4 percent reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, but only a 1 percent reduction in 2030.
Read more at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
