The Global Carbon Budget 2026, published on 10 November during the COP31 climate talks, projects that China's fossil CO2 emissions will fall 0.9% this year, after two years in which growth almost stopped. That would be China's first annual fall since 2016. But one projected fall is not a peak: the budget's range runs from a 2.6% fall to a 0.8% rise, and twice since 2015 a fall it projected for China turned out to be a rise.
Oil, gas and cement are projected to fall, coal to rise
The projected fall is not China's alone. The report by the Global Carbon Project, the scientists who compile the budget, projects that global fossil CO2, counting the CO2 that cement reabsorbs, will drop 0.4% this year (range −1.5% to +0.6%), after last year's 1.2% rise. It projects bigger falls for the USA, the EU and Japan, and a 4.4% rise for India. For China it projects that emissions from oil will fall 4.6%, those from cement 6.2%, and those from gas by less. Coal, about 71% of China's fossil CO2, is projected to rise 0.3%. Applying those rates to China's emissions by fuel last year, oil accounts for about 89 million of the 112-million-tonne fall implied by the overall projection, on our calculation.
The budget's press release explains the fall in oil only for the world as a whole, not for China, calling it "likely a short-term response to the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict". For China it adds that "electricity generation from renewables continues to grow strongly". Glen Peters of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research, one of the report's authors, speaking about global emissions, set out the test in the same release: "A drop in emissions in one year is not a peak unless it is driven by structural change."
Growth had already almost stopped
The projection follows two years of near-zero growth. On the Global Carbon Project's national dataset, which counts CO2 from fossil fuels, cement and other carbonate uses such as lime in mainland China, emissions rose 5.2% in 2023 and have barely grown since. Emissions reached 12.4 billion tonnes in 2025, nominally China's highest year. The figures for the last two years are themselves preliminary, extended from earlier years with energy growth rates, and earlier editions' estimates of China's growth in their latest year were later revised by as much as 2.9 percentage points (comparison).
Projected falls have turned into rises before
A fall would not be new either. China's emissions fell for two years after 2014, then passed that level again in 2017. The budget projected those falls at the time, and it has also projected falls that did not happen. The chart below compares its projection for China, made before the end of each year, with its first estimate from actual data a year later.
In two of the four years when it projected a fall, 2020 and 2022, the first estimate from actual data was a rise. The projections have missed by up to 3.2 points, more than three times the fall now projected. A separate near-real-time estimate in the same report, from Carbon Monitor, points the same way as the budget, with a fall of 2.3%. But the budget's own range for China, which covers growth only and not doubts about the starting level, still includes a small rise.
In 2024 and 2025 the rest of the world added more CO2 than China
China added more CO2 than the rest of the world in 2022 and 2023, and less in each of the two years since. The chart below compares the yearly change in China's emissions with the change in the rest of the world, which here includes international shipping and aviation.
The balance flipped in 2024: China's additions shrank as the rest of the world's grew.
Too early to call a peak
So has China's fossil CO2 peaked? Not on this evidence. The case rests on one projected year, built from the data available for 2026, after two preliminary ones, and the budget's projections for China have missed in both directions. A peak needs what follows: later years that stay below 2025's level, on firm statistics, and, in Peters's words, a drop "driven by structural change".
How this was made
Figures to 2025 are from the Global Carbon Project's national fossil CO2 dataset, version 2026v11 (Andrew and Peters, doi:10.5281/zenodo.23667912, CC BY 4.0), published on 26 October 2026 and retrieved on 13 November 2026. The 2026 projections and the track record come from the Global Carbon Budget 2026 report (Friedlingstein and colleagues, ESSD preprint, doi:10.5194/essd-2026-895, CC BY 4.0) and its supplement's Table S6. No GCB data file gives China's 2026 projection or the track record, so we transcribed the report's figures (figures, track record). The 2026 level on chart 1 applies the projected growth to this dataset's 2025 figure; the report gives about 12.3 billion tonnes. Growth rates allow for 2024's leap day, as the budget's do; on calendar totals China's 2025 rise was 0.1%. fetch.mjs, calculate.mjs, china-co2-peak-make-charts.mjs and render-readme.mjs reproduce the tables, statistics, charts and text; method and sources are in DATA.md and PROVENANCE.md. From the download folder, run:
npm ci
npm run build # calculate, check the wording's premises, charts, text
Data: Global Carbon Project fossil CO2 emissions dataset (2026v11), Andrew and Peters; Global Carbon Budget 2026, Friedlingstein and colleagues; both CC BY 4.0. Charts: DataHub.