Financial rating agency Fitch Ratings released data today showing that the reduction in polluting gas emissions in advanced economies is being cancelled out by the increase in emerging markets, including Brazil.
‘Five of the countries analysed by Fitch saw an annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions last year, and all of them were emerging markets: India, China, Mexico, Brazil and Russia,’ reads an analysis by this rating agency of the environmental targets, with the title “Decarbonisation of the world economy is progressing too slowly”.
In these countries, the analysts add, ‘high growth rates in Gross Domestic Product have led to an increase in emissions, with minimal impact either from decarbonising energy or from improving the energy efficiency of GDP’.
In the report, sent to investors and to which Lusa has had access, Fitch Ratings points out that last year ‘little progress was made in accelerating the pace of decarbonisation of world GDP’, i.e. the weight of polluting activities in the growth of the economy.
Global CO2 emissions increased by 1.8 per cent, compared to GDP growth of 2.9 per cent; the ratio of emissions to GDP fell by just over 1 per cent, in line with the average annual decline over the last 25 years, but massively below the 8 per cent annual decline that is needed between 2020 and 2030 to guarantee ‘zero emissions’ in 2050’.
Even so, it is in the advanced economies that decarbonisation is making the most progress, with a fall in the ratio of emissions to GDP of 6%.
In emerging economies, the average GDP growth was in line with the evolution of emissions, at 4.7 per cent.
‘Neither energy efficiency nor carbon utilisation in energy showed any improvement, the worst performance in more than a decade,’ warns Fitch.
The analysts warn that ‘the lack of progress in decarbonising emerging markets is particularly worrying given their faster pace of growth and increasing share of global energy consumption’.
One of the reasons that may explain the poor performance of emerging markets is the lack of investment in clean energy projects, with the exception of China, concludes Fitch Ratings, recalling a BloombergNEF report from January this year, which points out that almost all the growth in clean energy investments has been made in advanced economies and China.
Lusa
