Mapping Europe’s greener, post-Covid future As European economies emerge from the coronavirus crisis, the next challenge is building climate resilience throughout the continent. ECMWF can provide the climate data, tools, and analysis to make sure these efforts are a success, says Dr Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at ECMWF. Source: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) 03 May 2021 The global economy really struggled during 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Did this have any noticeable effect on climate change? As many societies shut down, we saw a drop in carbon emissions by about 7 percent, or around 2.3 billion tonnes. This is different to carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, which have continued to rise, albeit at a slightly slower rate. But the effects of climate change we’re already seeing today - the observed trends in European climate and the change in the occurrence of some extreme weather events, for example - are not caused by recent emissions, but by everything we’ve emitted in the past. This accumulating effect means we are heading for a world characterised by more intense variation, and only by bringing down emissions permanently can we start to contain the impacts of climate change.