Total energy-related CO₂ emissions increased by 1.1% in 2023. Far from falling rapidly - as is required to meet the global climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement - CO₂ emissions reached a new record high of 37.4 Gt in 2023.1 This estimate is based on the IEA’s detailed, cutting-edge region-by-region and fuel-by-fuel analysis of the latest official national energy data, supplemented by data on economic and weather conditions.

Understanding the various drivers behind this emissions growth provides insights into the progress and prospects for the energy transition. This report provides a timely analysis of both the latest emissions trends and the underlying energy sector drivers in 2023. It represents a companion piece to our first ever Clean Energy Market Monitor, released in parallel.

The 1.1% increase in emissions in 2023 represented an increase of around 410 million tonnes (Mt CO₂). The percentage growth of emissions was substantially slower than global GDP growth, which was around 3% in 2023. Last year therefore continued the recent trend of CO₂ growing more slowly than global economic activity. Over the ten years ending with 2023, global CO₂ emissions have grown by slightly more than 0.5% per year. This is not just due to the Covid-19 pandemic: although emissions fell precipitously in 2020, by the following year they had already rebounded to the pre-pandemic level. It was also not caused by slow global GDP growth, which averaged a robust 3% per year across the course of the previous decade, in line with the annual average over the last 50 years.

The rate of emissions growth seen over the last decade is slower than that seen during the 1970s and 1980s, which saw major disruptions with the two energy shocks of 1973-4 and 1979-80, and a macroeconomic shock of global significance with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. When the last ten years are put in a broader historical context, a comparably slow rate of CO₂ emissions growth only occurred in the extremely disruptive decades of World War I and the Great Depression. Global CO₂ emissions are therefore undergoing a structural slowdown even as global prosperity grows.

Clean energy is at the heart of this slowdown in emissions. Global capacity additions of wind and solar PV reached a record almost 540 GW in 2023, up 75% on the level of 2022. Global sales of electric cars climbed to around 14 million, an increase of 35% on the level of 2022. Clean energy is having a significant impact on the trajectory of global CO₂ emissions.

On the back of Covid-19 stimulus packages, there has been a significant acceleration in clean energy deployment since 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, total energy-related emissions increased around 900 Mt. Without the growing deployment of five key clean energy technologies since 2019 - solar PV, wind power, nuclear power, heat pumps, and electric cars - the emissions growth would have been three times larger.