Some melt, others freeze, the plant that does not grow, the city that floods. Climate change is a creature with many faces, yet carbon dioxide is its strongest "personality". The Paris Agreement aims to reduce emissions, but at the same time we must measure them accurately, and so we come to a study that managed to estimate emissions and reductions in more than a hundred countries, using data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission.
The Paris Agreement, in its Article 14, speaks of a "Global Stocktake" or "Global Balance" that seeks to evaluate its overall implementation and the collective progress of the signatory countries. That same article defined 2023 as the year in which the first of these stocktakes will take place, during the COP28 conference scheduled for next November 30 in Dubai.
But it is impossible to make an assessment without accurate information, and fortunately there are missions like NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). Thanks to its measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations between 2015 and 2020, OCO-2 served as the basis for a study involving more than 60 researchers, estimating the emissions and reductions of a hundred countries.
Carbon dioxide emissions and reductions, visualized thanks to NASA
The first video is based on emissions from fossil fuels between 2015 and 2020. Unsurprisingly, the United States and China are the largest emitters, but India and Russia also stand out on the map. The second video shows us the amount of carbon stored in forest soils and other organic matter. Deforestation is one of the main factors to consider in this chart, with Brazil and Indonesia at the forefront.
The study helps us gain a new perspective by tracking emissions from fossil fuels and the "stock" of carbon stored in different ecosystems. However, its authors also recognize limitations due to the lack of information related to certain activities, such as tree felling.
In reality, the atmosphere does not care about the origin of carbon dioxide emissions. As Noel Cressie, professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia and one of the study's authors, explains, it doesn't matter whether we talk about deforestation of the Amazon or fires in the Canadian Arctic; all these processes increase CO2 concentrations and accelerate climate change. Monitoring these changes is and will continue to be essential to adopt more effective policies in the future.
Official announcement: Click here
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