Some of the behaviour seen during the COVID-19 lockdown could inform future policy, such as giving people incentives to work from home
Grounded flights, emptied highways and shuttered factories caused global carbon-dioxide emissions to fall to levels not seen since 2006 as stay-at-home orders peaked last month.
To an optimist, the CO₂ numbers during the lockdown show that “it’s possible to reduce emissions. That’s just not the way that we want to do it,” said Glen Peters, research director of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, and a co-author of the study. “So we just have to figure out another way to do it. But we know we can do it.”
That such an undesirable and dramatic sequence of events sets back the global emissions rate just 14 years — to a year already inflamed by a landmark U.K. climate study and Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth – may be the pandemic’s most consequential climate lesson. If anything, COVID-19 may lead to greater awareness of the scale of the challenge to bring climate change under control. A UN report from last fall suggested that global emissions need to fall 7.6 per cent every year from 2020 to 2030 for the world to have a chance at limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
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