Coronavirus Lockdown Will Cause Only 4% Drop In Global Carbon Emissions, Says Report

The spread of the novel Coronavirus across countries has brought the world to a crashing halt. With the resulting lockdown, all operations have come to a pause and an unintentional result of this has been almost no global carbon emissions produced.

A new report tries to measure exactly how big of an impact has the Coronavirus pandemic caused on global emissions -- and let us warn you, it's not a whole lot, despite whatever you've been reading so far.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

An estimate by CarbonBrief, based on an analysis of data sets representing three-quarters of worldwide emissions, says that the total decline in global emissions in 2020 would roughly be around 4%.

With that, Coronavirus will become the reason for the largest annual drop in global emissions ever recorded in human history, trumping events like economic recessions or wars.

On the flip side, this can be taken as a cue as to how tough it is to bring the global carbon emissions under control. To prevent 1.5 degree Celsius of further global warming, the world emissions need to be cut by 6% every year for the next decade.

Reuters

While things are in favour of the same right now, it will not be long when the lockdown is lifted in many countries and the operations are back to normal, bringing back the associated carbon emission.

Even as the rest of the world suffers and remains locked down, China is going back to work and is already producing carbon emissions in almost similar quantities as before, just a few months after the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

As per CarbonBrief, the 4% mark is a rough estimate based on limited data. This derivative can change depending on how the outbreak unfolds.

Representative image

However, the limited number does remind us of a dire need of changes in our lifestyle and our energy sources, something that we need to get serious about immediately to prevent any long term impact on global emission trends post COVID-19.

If even a lockdown like this is just a slither of impact, climate change will certainly result to much harder times than the ongoing Coronavirus.