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🇲🇦 Morocco's Sources of CO₂ Emissions

Morocco's Sources of CO2 Emissions

✨ Key Insights

Early Industrialization and Independence

Morocco's journey through industrialization began with the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, which spurred infrastructure development and increased CO₂ emissions from coal and other fossil fuels. Following independence in 1956, Morocco's focus on economic development and modernization further accelerated emissions, as the expansion of agriculture and industry contributed to a rise in greenhouse gases.

Phosphate Industry and Energy Reforms

The 1980s marked a significant increase in emissions due to the expansion of Morocco's phosphate industry, a major contributor to industrial CO₂ emissions. The energy-intensive nature of phosphate extraction and processing, primarily powered by fossil fuels, played a crucial role in this rise. In the early 2000s, energy sector reforms aimed to improve efficiency and increase energy production, leading to a shift towards natural gas infrastructure, which, while cleaner than coal, still contributed to CO₂ emissions.

Renewable Energy Initiatives

Morocco's commitment to reducing emissions took a significant turn with the launch of its solar energy plan in 2009 and the inauguration of the Noor Solar Complex in 2014. These initiatives marked a shift towards renewable energy, significantly reducing CO₂ emissions by replacing fossil fuel-based energy with solar power. Hosting COP22 in 2016 further underscored Morocco's dedication to addressing climate change, catalyzing policy and investment in sustainable practices.

Pandemic-Induced Emission Reductions

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to a temporary reduction in emissions as lockdowns curtailed transportation and industrial activity. This highlighted the potential for emissions reductions through behavioral and policy changes, offering insights for future climate strategies. However, the long-term impact was limited as activities resumed, emphasizing the need for sustained efforts in emission reduction.

Background

The chart shows a national breakdown by source of the yearly CO2 emissions from human activities and processes expressed in megatonnes. It is critical to know and track the sources of national CO2 emissions in order to understand their individual impacts on climate change.

The sources of human CO2 emissions are

  • CO2 From Fossil Fuels and Industry: coal, oil, gas combustion, other fossil processes
  • CO2 From Land-Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry

Coal, oil and gas combustion

Fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the combustion of coal, oil and gas are emitted by processes in electricity generation, transport, industry, and the building sector. All processes can be linked to human activities. Examples include driving cars with combustion engines burning diesel or gas, or electric cars charged by electricity from a power plant that burns coal.

Other fossil processes

Fossil CO2 emissions from other processes include sources like cement manufacturing and production of chemicals and fertilizers. Cement also has an absorption factor highlighted in the absorption breakdown chart.

Land-use change

Human civilization emits CO2 by changing and managing its land. Those emissions come, for example, from deforestation, logging, forest degradation, harvest activities and shifting agriculture cultivation. Land-use change also absorbs considerable amounts of CO2, which is shown in the absorption breakdown chart. Land-use change emits more than it absorbs, so the net effect is still emissions, but less than for coal, oil and gas.

Wikipedia: Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Earth System Science Data: GCP 2020 paper: Section 2.2 Land-use change; Section 2.1 Fossil fuel emissions
IPCC: Annual Report 6, 5.2.1.1 Anthropogenic CO2 emissions

Units and Measures

CO2 emissions are expressed in the total weight in megatonnes per year. 1 Megatonne is equal to 1 million tonnes.

Wikipedia: Megatonne
Wikipedia: Global warming potential

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About the Data

The last available year is 2023. CO2 emissions data is from the Global Carbon Project. It contains national CO2 emissions from fossil sources and land-use change.

The Key Insights paragraph was generated using a large language model (LLM) using a structured approach to improve the accuracy. This included separating the context generation from the interpretation and narrative.

Data Sources

Global Carbon Budget 2024 Global Carbon Budget
Update cycle: yearlyDelay: ~ 10 months after the end of the year. Current year values are estimated and published in November.Credits: Friedlingstein et al., 2024, ESSD. Friedlingstein, P., O'Sullivan, M., Jones, M. W., Andrew, R. M., Hauck, J., Landschützer, P., Le Quéré, C., Li, H., Luijkx, I. T., Olsen, A., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Alin, S. R., Arneth, A., Arora, V., Bates, N. R., Becker, M., Bellouin, N., Berghoff, C. F., Bittig, H. C., Bopp, L., Cadule, P., Campbell, K., Chamberlain, M. A., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Colligan, T., Decayeux, J., Djeutchouang, L., Dou, X., Duran Rojas, C., Enyo, K., Evans, W., Fay, A., Feely, R. A., Ford, D. J., Foster, A., Gasser, T., Gehlen, M., Gkritzalis, T., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Gürses, Ö., Harris, I., Hefner, M., Heinke, J., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Jacobson, A. R., Jain, A., Jarníková, T., Jersild, A., Jiang, F., Jin, Z., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Korsbakken, J. I., Lauvset, S. K., Lefèvre, N., Liu, Z., Liu, J., Ma, L., Maksyutov, S., Marland, G., Mayot, N., McGuire, P., Metzl, N., Monacci, N. M., Morgan, E. J., Nakaoka, S.-I., Neill, C., Niwa, Y., Nützel, T., Olivier, L., Ono, T., Palmer, P. I., Pierrot, D., Qin, Z., Resplandy, L., Roobaert, A., Rosan, T. M., Rödenbeck, C., Schwinger, J., Smallman, T. L., Smith, S., Sospedra-Alfonso, R., Steinhoff, T., Sun, Q., Sutton, A. J., Séférian, R., Takao, S., Tatebe, H., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Torres, O., Tourigny, E., Tsujino, H., Tubiello, F., van der Werf, G., Wanninkhof, R., Wang, X., Yang, D., Yang, X., Yu, Z., Yuan, W., Yue, X., Zaehle, S., Zeng, N., and Zeng, J.: Global Carbon Budget 2024, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-519, in review, 2024.