Total greenhouse gas emissions (without LULUCF)

The change in global GHG emissions over the historical series inventoried corresponds to a pattern of several phases fundamentally linked to variations in economic growth, population trends and energy consumption in Spain since 1990. In the first half of the 1990s, the trend shows an irregular increase, linked to the economic development of Spain in the first years of the decade and the economic recession of 1992 and 1993. The growth of the Spanish economy and population between 1995 and 2008 is reflected in an increase in GHG emissions, reaching their highest level in the series in 2007 (+ 54.1% compared with 1990 levels). From 2008 onwards, with the onset of the global economic crisis, there was a marked decrease in national emissions until 2013. In the following years, despite the recovery of macroeconomic growth levels, global emissions seem to show a phase of relative stabilisation. From 2017 onwards, a downward trend in emissions is observed, with the exception of 2021 and 2022, years of economic recovery and reactivation after the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, emissions were 7.6% lower than the estimated emissions in 2022 and 12.6% lower than in 2019, the year before the COVID pandemic crisis. Despite its being a year of growth in the Spanish economy (a 2.7% increase in gross domestic product (GDP) compared with 2022), the decoupling between economic growth and GHG emissions continues.

In 2023, transport (at 32.5%) was the subsector with the largest share of overall GHG emissions, followed by industrial activities (18.6%), the agricultural sector (agriculture and livestock combined, at 12.2%), electricity generation (11.4%), fuel consumption in the residential, commercial and institutional sectors (8.5%), and waste (5.1%).

The measures envisaged in the NECP make it possible to achieve an emission reduction level of 32% in 2030, compared with 1990 levels.