Government policies work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have been effective, however more stringent regulations are needed to limit global warming to the Paris temperature goals, finds a new analysis by UCL researchers of international efforts to fight climate change. The research, published in Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources , tracked the rate of greenhouse gas emissions over the last two decades against global efforts to reduce them. Since the early 2000s, governments around the world have enacted numerous regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Over the same period of time, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, but the rate of annual increase has slowed in recent years from 2.3% per year between 2000 and 2010 to 1.3% per year until 2014 when it dropped to only 0.8% per year. These policies include efforts to reduce energy use, lower the costs of clean tech, limit deforestation and promote clean energy. The researchers find that had the world not enacted this range of climate mitigation policies, significantly more carbon dioxide would have been emitted into the atmosphere over the same period of time. They estimate that each year, between 2 to 7 billion fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere than in a world without mitigation policies, representing a decrease of 4% to 15%.