Most of the world’s economic growth is now decoupled from carbon emissions, according to a new study from a UK non-profit organization.
The Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) analyzed Global Carbon Budget data across 113 countries and found that 92% of global GDP is now either relatively or absolutely decoupled from emissions.
This a 19% improvement on figures for the decade preceding the Paris Agreement (2006-2015).
The researchers found that decoupling is widespread across advanced economies even when accounting for emissions embodied in imports.
A total of 21 countries reduced their dependence on generating carbon emissions to fuel economic growth between 2015-2023, including China and India.
The turnaround in China – the world’s largest source of carbon emissions by far – is particularly notable.
The country’s emissions have now been flat or falling for the last 18 months. Separate analysis by Carbon Brief suggests this is largely due to rapid adoption of electric vehicles and an aggressive transition from fossil fuels toward renewables for energy generation.
The United Arab Emirates, Mexico and South Africa are among the other countries that have improved in the last decade.
Only eight countries that had decoupled their economic growth from carbon emissions before 2015 are now dependent on them again to some extent (New Zealand, Latvia, Slovenia, Lithuania, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Togo and Azerbaijan).
“We’re sometimes told the world can’t cut emissions without cutting growth,” said John Lang, Net Zero Tracker Lead at ECIU and a co-author of the study.
“The opposite is happening. Decoupling is now the norm, not the exception – and the share of the global economy that is decoupling emissions in an absolute sense is steadily increasing.”
Gareth Redmond-King, Head of International at ECIU, said: “The momentum built by the Paris Agreement is unstoppable – the economic realities make it so. Solutions like solar power have outperformed pre-Paris predictions many times over, as costs have plummeted and investment in clean energy outstrips that in fossil fuels by two to one.”
