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Climate chronicles

Global carbon emissions and decarbonization in 2024

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 6, pages 231–233 (2025) Cite this article

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Global CO2 emissions in 2024 increased 0.9% on the previous year, totalling 36.3 Gt CO2. These ongoing emissions further deplete remaining carbon budgets, with some estimates suggesting the 1.5 °C budget will be surpassed within the next 5 years — and may have been already.

Key points

  • Global emissions averaged 99.3 Mt CO2 per day, with the largest growth coming from India and Russia, and a slight reduction from China.

  • Global non-fossil energy development grew 6.2%, corresponding to an estimated 9.8 Gt CO2 of Scope 4 (that is, avoided) emissions in 2024.

  • 0–205 Gt CO2 remains of the carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5 °C, suggesting permissible emissions have already been exceeded or could be depleted within 5.1 years; 860–955 Gt CO2 remains of the 2 °C budget, which could be depleted within 21.3–23.7 years (at 67% likelihood).

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Fig. 1: Global CO2 emissions and projections 1985–2050.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Data availability

Daily CO2 emissions by sector and by country from 1st January 2019 onwards are available from the Carbon Monitor database (https://carbonmonitor.org). Global annual CO2 emissions from 1970 to 2018 were obtained from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) (https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/emissions_data_and_maps). Data on global land-use change emissions are available from the Global Carbon Budget 2024 (https://doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2024). Electricity production data by energy source from 1985 to 2023 are available from Statistical Review of World Energy 2024, Energy Institute (EI) (https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/resources-and-data-downloads), and emission factors are estimated by using sectoral emission data from EDGAR and thermal generation data by EI. Electricity generation and emission factors in 2024 are estimated based on daily electricity production data from the Carbon Monitor Power (https://power.carbonmonitor.org/), which encompass power generation information from 58 countries and accounts for approximately 80% of global electricity production. Projections of electricity generation by sources and emissions for 2025–2050 are sourced from IEA World Energy Outlook 2024 (https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2024), and emission factors of electricity generation are calculated based on the projected thermal production and projected power emissions.

References

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation (CNEST) programme, Research Grants Council-Strategic Topics Grant STG2/P-705/24-R and the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhu Deng, Dabo Guan & Zhu Liu

  2. Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Zhu Deng & Peng Gong

  3. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Biqing Zhu

  4. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Steven J. Davis

  5. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement LSCE, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

  6. State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhu Liu

Authors
  1. Zhu Deng
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Correspondence to Zhu Liu.

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Deng, Z., Zhu, B., Davis, S.J. et al. Global carbon emissions and decarbonization in 2024. Nat Rev Earth Environ 6, 231–233 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00658-x

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