Two Years Under the Paris Agreement: How's It Working?

This month’s UN Climate Change conference (COP24) in Poland is already in full swing. The delegates to COP24 aim to develop and adopt implementation guidelines and rules to transform the Paris Agreement of 2015 from an international accord that’s three years old into a reduction in the temperature globally by 1.5°C.

• According to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are the main cause of global warming. Reducing GHG emissions is therefore singularly important to halting global warming.

With two full years of data now available since the Paris Agreement was signed, how are countries doing in achieving its central aim? Today we examine CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Why? CO2 constitutes 76 percent of total GHG emissions. As fuel combustion constitutes 90 percent of CO2 emissions, emissions from fuel combustion are not only a major driver of GHG emissions, accounting for 68 percent of total emissions globally, but a useful early indicator of the power of the Paris Agreement.

• On net, emissions have continued to rise. Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels increased by 2 percent from 2015 to 2017, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
• Gains made by the likes of the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Japan to cut these emissions were more than offset by rising emissions from India, China, Turkey, Iran, Canada, and the Russian Federation, which combined accounted for half of the increase in emissions.