“It will be complicated to maintain such a pace in the coming years,” warns François Gemenne

Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC, president of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Nature and Man and member of the IPCC.

When we talk about climate, we are often forced to announce bad news. But last year, greenhouse gas emissions fell by 5.8%.

François Gemenne: This is indeed very good news for the climate, I am not going to tell you the opposite. This is a figure that is better than expected, and even better than the previous estimate. We went from 396 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2022 to 373 million tonnes in 2023. And we understand that the government wants to put this figure to its credit, obviously, it’s fair game – especially since emissions have been in continuous decline in France since 2017, it must be said.

This is, of course, not just because of government policies. But precisely, this is the very, very good news from the report: emissions are falling in all sectors, thanks to changes in consumption, thanks to the action of companies, and also thanks to certain policies put in place.

There is first a big drop in the energy sector, which is largely explained by the restart of several nuclear reactors which were shut down in 2022, but also by the rise in power of renewable energies, in particular wind power. And so we have had much less use of gas and coal power plants. And the icing on the cake is that our electricity consumption has also fallen by 3%: in the energy sector, we have therefore combined efficiency and sobriety. Result: emissions from energy industries have fallen in 2023 to their 1990 level, 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Another sector that impresses in 2023: construction, thanks to a spectacular drop in emissions linked to heating. Here, again, we fall back to the level of 1990. There is the effect of the weather, but not only that. In 2014, which is the only year where we recorded declines comparable to those of this year, it was clearly the weather. This year, there are also other factors, starting with inflation: energy prices have remained very high, which has encouraged us to heat less. And this proves that the price signal works: we tend to limit our emissions if it allows us to save money. And then there was also, it must be said, the effect of policies encouraging the renovation of buildings, the installation of heat pumps, and the campaigns encouraging sobriety, which had been launched in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. These are behavioral changes that are taking hold.

In industry too, things are changing, with a drop in emissions of almost 9%, and enormous progress, particularly in the cement, steel and chemicals industries. And I know, from seeing them very regularly, that there are plenty of people in these sectors who work daily to decarbonize industrial processes, and so it’s really pleasing to see that these actions are bearing fruit, well done to them.

“Even in agriculture, it’s falling! It’s less spectacular, but still: -1.6%. A little less cattle, a little less fertilizer, and a little more methane digesters…”

François Gemenne

on franceinfo

That leaves transport. It is the leading sector of emissions, with almost a third of the national total. We are down -3.4%. So, of course this is also falling, but we could, we should do much better, particularly in road transport, which represents the vast majority of emissions in this sector. And the decline can be explained by high fuel prices, but also thanks to the deployment of electric vehicles, city cycling and carpooling. This is why we should be concerned about the current decline in electric car sales.

There is also good news in air transport. A drop in emissions of 3.4% on domestic traffic: this is the effect of the ban on very short flights. And in international traffic, post-Covid growth continues, but we remain 15% below the 2019 level.

France is not the only one to reduce its emissions. The United States is finally starting to decline: -2%. The United Kingdom has just published figures comparable to ours: -5.7%. And Germany, which we like to ridicule so much, has reduced its emissions by… 10% in 2023.

“All this means that we can do it, and it’s important to convince ourselves of that!”

François Gemenne

on franceinfo

But there are still two problems: our forests absorb less and less carbon. It is a less and less important carbon sink, due to droughts, tree diseases and logging. So that means that we will have to decrease further in other sectors, because we will no longer be able to rely as much as before on forests to absorb our surplus.

The other problem is that we have set a linear trajectory, with the same objective each year until 2030. But there are emissions that are easier to reduce than others, and that we obviously start with the easiest: in the energy sector, for example, it will be complicated to maintain such a rate of decline in the coming years. So we should have much more marked declines from now on, because the beginning is easier than the end… The linear trajectory is an illusion.