Clean power growth lowered power-sector emissions even as total CO2 rose

What happened

A Nature Reviews Earth & Environment assessment reports that fossil-fuel and industrial carbon dioxide emissions reached 37.2 billion tonnes in 2025, up 0.7% from 2024. The encouraging signal is in electricity: the authors estimate that large-scale clean-power deployment avoided 10.3 billion tonnes of emissions and helped global power-sector emissions fall 0.9%, even as total emissions still rose. The avoided-emissions value is a modeled counterfactual, while the emissions estimates draw on Carbon Monitor and other inventories.

Why it matters

This is real progress worth building on: clean electricity is beginning to separate growing power demand from fossil-fuel emissions. It is not yet an all-economy decline, so the practical next step is to keep expanding clean power, grids, storage, efficiency, and electrification rather than treating the job as finished.

What to watch

• Whether the power-sector decline continues and spreads to transport, buildings, and industry as clean electricity expands.
• Revisions to provisional 2025 emissions data and transparent updates to the assumptions behind avoided-emissions estimates.

Sources & evidence

• Global carbon emissions and decarbonization in 2025Nature Reviews Earth & Environment Year in Review, DOI 10.1038/s43017-026-00780-4, published April 14, 2026. The assessment synthesizes Carbon Monitor, national inventories, EDGAR, and related evidence; avoided emissions are modeled rather than directly observed.
• Carbon MonitorNear-real-time emissions dataset identified by the authors as a core data source.

Topics

• Clean Electricity
• Carbon Emissions
• Renewable Energy
• Power Sector
• Climate Progress