  A strong edge-coloring of a graph $G$ is an edge-coloring in which every
color class is an induced matching, and the strong chromatic index $\chi_s'(G)$
is the minimum number of colors needed in strong edge-colorings of $G$. A graph
is $2$-degenerate if every subgraph has minimum degree at most $2$. Choi, Kim,
Kostochka, and Raspaud (2016) showed $\chi_s'(G) \leq 5\Delta +1$ if $G$ is a
$2$-degenerate graph with maximum degree $\Delta$. In this article, we improve
it to $\chi_s'(G)\le 5\Delta-\Delta^{1/2-\epsilon}+2$ when
$\Delta>4^{1/(2\epsilon)}$ for any $0<\epsilon<1/2$.
