Study Finds 80% of Major Cities Show Economic Growth Outpacing NO₂ Emissions Declines, 2019–2024

An assessment of 2,475 of the world’s biggest cities has found that in 80 percent of them, economic growth is no longer dependent on an increase in fossil-fuel-related emissions. The study, published in Nature Cities on or before 2026-05-11, combined satellite observations with economic data to track changes between January 2019 and December 2024.

Daniel Moran, an environmental economist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research in Kjeller, and his colleagues conducted the research.

It marks a shift from the historical pattern in which economic expansion has been tightly coupled with fossil fuel use. The team drew on satellite data from the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite mission to measure NO₂ levels in the troposphere above cities. NO₂ is produced when fuel is burnt in vehicles, power plants and industrial facilities.

The researchers then combined those emissions readings with local GDP information per capita for the same five-year period. This approach created an indicator of economic activity linked with fossil-fuel use. It allowed Moran to see the green development trajectory over time of cities globally.

The findings indicate that almost 2,000 cities worldwide have implemented green policies that generated economic prosperity while reducing dependencies on fossil fuels. Cities now house more than half of the world’s population, and that urbanization has come hand-in-hand with ecological degradation, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions in past decades.

The new data suggest many urban centers have begun to break that link.

@Nature reported that cities with policies to cut fossil-fuel emissions have also seen economic growth. Michail Fragkias, an applied economist at Boise State University in Idaho who was not involved in the work, reviewed the findings. “This research is revealing the importance of cities in addressing twenty-first-century sustainability challenges,” Fragkias said.

The study’s reliance on tropospheric NO₂ as a proxy offered a consistent global view that ground-based reporting often cannot match. By tracking changes from January 2019 through December 2024, researchers captured both pre-pandemic baselines and post-pandemic recovery patterns in thousands of urban economies.

The result points to a broad decoupling that earlier national-level analyses had not fully revealed at the city scale.