The climate crisis is not caused solely by the emission of CO₂, carbon dioxide. Gases such as methane are also among the drivers of climate change. These are summarized under the term “greenhouse gases”. They lead to the greenhouse effect, which causes man-made global warming.
The Climate Protection Act for Germany of 2019 therefore sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions in so-called CO₂ equivalents. For example, since one tonne of methane and one tonne of CO₂ do not have the same effect on the greenhouse effect, methane and other gases are converted into CO₂ equivalents for the sake of simplicity.
The Federal Environment Agency publishes new data every year, including a previous year’s estimate of emissions for the previous year. This estimate is preliminary and will be updated in later releases. However, since at least the trend (more or fewer emissions) can be read from it, ZDFheute already uses the previous year’s estimate.
ZDFtoday compares the absolute emissions in millions of tons of CO₂ equivalents with the emissions in 1990 in order to record how much less Germany emits compared to 1990. The goals in the Climate Protection Act are also based on this year.