File : D5.11
Author : Robbie Andrew (CICERO)
With the international goals of the Paris Agreement and the growing number of time-bound national goals for emissions reductions, reliable estimates of CO2 emissions are becoming more and more important. In particular, reducing the time lag of these estimates and producing short-term projections are gaining importance as the remaining time until mitigation deadlines becomes shorter.
The Global Carbon Project has been producing a current-year projection of global CO2 emissions since 2012, introducing a sub-projection for the European Union in 2018. The success of this EU projection has been variable, and this deliverable explores in detail how the projections in 2019 were made along with some of the reasons why the projections have high uncertainty and bias.
About 84% of the total error in the projection of EU emissions in 2019 was because of a poor projection for coal consumption, which was a result of poor estimates of sub-annual observations, a misunderstanding of conflicting information, and poor assumptions applied to the remainder of the year. The correction of the errors identified here will go a considerable way towards improving future short-term projections of the European Union’s CO2 emissions, paving the way for a low-maintenance, operational system.
Figure 1 : Performance of the methods used in 2019 to estimate sub-annual CO2 emissions in the EU, compared with the follow year's release using annual data
