Fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions are projected to total 38.2 billion tonnes in 2026, a drop of 0.4% from 2025, according to the 2026 Global Carbon Budget. The decline would interrupt a long climb in which the 2025 total rose 1.2%. Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter led the study.
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Researchers attribute the dip to a mix of fast clean-energy growth and a sudden shock to energy markets.
The 38.2 billion tonne projection and its error bar
The projection comes from the University of Exeter release on the 2026 budget, which the Global Carbon Project compiled with about 150 researchers. The preprint on the journal’s discussion site gives the fossil estimate as a fall of 0.40% relative to 2025, within a range of -1.5% to +0.6%. A rise is therefore still inside the uncertainty band, even though the central estimate points down. Neither document says whether the fall would survive a revision of the energy statistics it leans on.
The 2025 baseline was 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon, expressed in the preprint as up 1.2% from 2024, including a 0.2 billion tonne cement carbonation sink. Because annual figures in this record usually climb, a year with a negative central estimate stands out against the recent run, and the project’s own summary page opens with the projected 0.4% decrease.
Set side by side, the series swings from a 1.2% rise in 2025 to a projected 0.4% fall in 2026, a turn of about 1.6 percentage points in a single year. The fuel percentages are each measured against that fuel’s own emissions, so they cannot simply be added to reach the 0.4% total.
A unit conversion helps with the scale. The 2025 estimate of 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon equals roughly 38.5 billion tonnes of CO2, so the 2026 projection of 38.2 billion tonnes is consistent with a small percentage fall. The preprint puts the 2025 level at 10.5 plus or minus 0.5 billion tonnes of carbon, an uncertainty on the absolute level that dwarfs a 0.4% move, which is why the year-over-year change is the figure the team stresses rather than the level itself.
Oil down 1.9%, gas down 0.3%, coal up 0.6%
The fuel split explains most of the movement. Oil emissions are projected to fall 1.9%, natural gas 0.3%, while coal rises 0.6%. The authors describe the fall as likely a short-term response to the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict, with expanding solar, wind and electric vehicles also helping. A drop driven by a price and supply shock is a different animal from one driven by structural change, and the release does not claim the two can be separated.
Friedlingstein said the long-term answer remains the rapid deployment of clean energy technologies. That statement fits the report’s own caution: an emissions dip caused partly by disruption does not guarantee a sustained decline once markets settle. The report’s lead author heads a team of about 150 researchers that rebuilds the whole carbon budget each year, so the 2026 projection will be revisited when full-year data arrive.
Land use, atmospheric CO2 and the 1.5C budget
Adding land-use change, total CO2 emissions are projected at 43.3 billion tonnes in 2026, up from 42.8 billion in 2025, so the combined human footprint still grows even as the fossil line dips. Atmospheric CO2 is projected to reach 427.7 parts per million, about 54% above the pre-industrial level of roughly 278 ppm, after a 2.2 ppm rise during the year. Land-use change emissions in 2025 were 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon with an uncertainty of 0.7, so the total-emissions line carries wider error than the fossil line alone.
The natural sinks absorbed a large share of the 2025 total. The preprint lists the ocean sink at 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon and the land sink at 3.6, against atmospheric growth of 4.4 billion tonnes of carbon, equal to a 2.06 ppm rise, which is 3.6 billion tonnes below the record growth of 2024. A budget imbalance of 0.5 billion tonnes of carbon remains unexplained, and the authors flag land-use emissions, the land flux in the northern extra-tropics and the ocean sink trend as persistent weak points.
The remaining carbon budget for holding warming to 1.5C is about 150 billion tonnes of CO2, which the release says is less than four years of emissions at the current rate. A 0.4% reduction barely changes that arithmetic: at 38.2 billion tonnes of fossil CO2 a year, plus land use, the allowance is gone around the end of the decade.
The full dataset sits under the project’s data DOI, and the discussion paper is registered at its own DOI. Whether the 2027 edition shows the fossil decline holding once the Iran-related shock fades is the open question for the authors. The author list in the preprint includes Michael O’Sullivan, Robbie Andrew, Corinne Le Quéré, Glen Peters and Bo Zheng alongside Friedlingstein. If the energy shock is the main driver of the 2026 dip, a calmer market would be expected to restore growth, and the release does not model a rebound.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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