Carbon Monitor: Global Daily CO2 Emissions from Fossil Fuels and Cement 2020

A -5.8% drop in global CO2 emissions occurred in 2020 compared to 2019, revealing COVID-19 impacts. Carbon Monitor provides near real-time daily CO2 emissions data with global coverage from six main sectors: power, industry, ground transportation, aviation, residential, and international shipping. The dataset for the full year of 2020 is presented by author Zhu Deng.

Use Cases

• Modeling the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on emissions based on daily, sector-level data.
• Analyzing seasonal and weekly patterns in CO2 emissions based on near real-time global data.
• Comparing emission reductions across sectors like power, industry, and transportation mentioned in the description.
• Benchmarking national or regional climate policy effectiveness against a global daily baseline.

Strengths

• Provides daily temporal resolution for emissions data, enabling fine-grained trend analysis.
• Covers six major economic sectors globally, allowing for cross-sectoral comparison.
• Documents a specific -5.8% year-over-year change in global CO2 emissions for 2020.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Carbon Monitor project (carbonmonitor.org).

Collection Method

Likely aggregated from a combination of activity data, fuel statistics, and satellite observations.

Time Range

2020

Geography

Global