Green
All the World’s Carbon Emissions in One Chart
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All the World’s Carbon Emissions in One Chart
Two degrees Celsius may not seem like much, but on our planet, it could be the difference between thriving life and a disastrous climate.
Over two centuries of burning fossil fuels have added up, and global decision-makers and business leaders are focusing in on carbon emissions as a key issue.
Emissions by Country
This week’s chart uses the most recent data from Global Carbon Atlas to demonstrate where most of the world’s CO₂ emissions come from, sorted by country.
| Rank | Country | Emissions in 2017 (MtCO₂) | % of Global Emissions |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 🇨🇳 China | 9,839 | 27.2% |
| #2 | 🇺🇸 United States | 5,269 | 14.6% |
| #3 | 🇮🇳 India | 2,467 | 6.8% |
| #4 | 🇷🇺 Russia | 1,693 | 4.7% |
| #5 | 🇯🇵 Japan | 1,205 | 3.3% |
| #6 | 🇩🇪 Germany | 799 | 2.2% |
| #7 | 🇮🇷 Iran | 672 | 1.9% |
| #8 | 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia | 635 | 1.8% |
| #9 | 🇰🇷 South Korea | 616 | 1.7% |
| #10 | 🇨🇦 Canada | 573 | 1.6% |
| #11 | 🇲🇽 Mexico | 490 | 1.4% |
| #12 | 🇮🇩 Indonesia | 487 | 1.3% |
| #13 | 🇧🇷 Brazil | 476 | 1.3% |
| #14 | 🇿🇦 South Africa | 456 | 1.3% |
| #15 | 🇹🇷 Turkey | 448 | 1.2% |
| 🌐 Top 15 | 26,125 | 72.2% | |
| 🌐 Rest of World | 10,028 | 27.7% |
In terms of absolute emissions, the heavy hitters are immediately obvious. Large economies such as China, the United States, and India alone account for almost half the world’s emissions. Zoom out a little further, and it’s even clearer that just a handful of countries are responsible for the majority of emissions.
Of course, absolute emissions don’t tell the full story. The world is home to over 7.5 billion people, but they aren’t distributed evenly across the globe. How do these carbon emissions shake out on a per capita basis?
Here are the 20 countries with the highest emissions per capita:
Source: Global Carbon Atlas. Note: We’ve only included places with a population above one million, which excludes islands and areas such as Curaçao, Brunei, Luxembourg, Iceland, Greenland, and Bermuda.
Out of the original 30 countries in the main visualization, six countries show up again as top CO₂ emitters when adjusted for population count: Saudi Arabia, the United States, Canada, South Korea, Russia, and Germany.
The CO₂ Conundrum
We know that rapid urbanization and industrialization have had an impact on carbon emissions entering the atmosphere, but at what rate?
Climate data scientist Neil Kaye answers the question from a different perspective, by mapping what percentage of emissions have been created during your lifetime since the Industrial Revolution:
| Your Age | % of Total Global Emissions |
|---|---|
| 15 years old | You've been alive for more than 30% of emissions |
| 30 years old | You've been alive for more than 50% of emissions |
| 85 years old | You've been alive for more than 90% of emissions |
Put another way, the running total of emissions is growing at an accelerating rate. This is best seen in the dramatic shortening between the time periods taken for 400 billion tonnes of CO₂ to enter the atmosphere:
- First period: 217 years (1751 to 1967)
- Second period: 23 years (1968 to 1990)
- Third period: 16 years (1991 to 2006)
- Fourth period: 11 years (2007 to 2018)
In order to be a decarbonised economy by 2050, we have to bend the (emissions) curve by 2020… Not only is it urgent and necessary, but actually we are very nicely on our way to achieving it.
— Christiana Figueres, Convenor of Mission 2020
Green
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
Gold has a long history as a precious metal, but just how many carbon emissions does mining it contribute to?
The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining
As companies progress towards net-zero goals, decarbonizing all sectors, including mining, has become a vital need.
Gold has a long history as a valuable metal due to its rarity, durability, and universal acceptance as a store of value. However, traditional gold mining is a process that is taxing on the environment and a major contributor to the increasing carbon emissions in our atmosphere.
The above infographic from our sponsor Nature’s Vault provides an overview of the global carbon footprint of gold mining.
The Price of Gold
To understand more about the carbon emissions that gold mining contributes to, we need to understand the different scopes that all emissions fall under.
In the mining industry, these are divided into three scopes.
- Scope 1: These include direct emissions from operations.
- Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from power generation.
- Scope 3: These cover all other indirect emissions.
With this in mind, let’s break down annual emissions in CO2e tonnes using data from the World Gold Council as of 2019. Note that total emissions are rounded to the nearest 1,000.
| Scope | Type | CO2e tonnes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mining, milling, concentrating and smelting | 45,490,000 |
| 2 | Electricity | 54,914,000 |
| 3 | Suppliers, goods, and services | 25,118,000 |
| 1,2,3 | Recycled Gold | 4,200 |
| 3 | Jewelry | 828,000 |
| 3 | Investment | 4,500 |
| 3 | Electronics | 168 |
| TOTAL | 126,359,000 |
Total annual emissions reach around 126,359,000 CO2e tonnes. To put this in perspective, that means that one year’s worth of gold mining is equivalent to burning nearly 300 million barrels of oil.
Gold in Nature’s Vault
A significant portion of gold’s downstream use is either for private investment or placed in banks. In other words, a large amount of gold is mined, milled, smelted, and transported only to be locked away again in a vault.
Nature’s Vault is decarbonizing the gold mining sector for both gold and impact investors by eliminating the most emission-intensive part of the mining process—mining itself.
By creating digital assets like the NaturesGold Token and the Pistol Lake NFT that monetize the preservation of gold in the ground, emissions and the environmental damage associated with gold mining are avoided.
How Does it Work?
Through the same forms of validation used in traditional mining by Canada’s National Instrument NI 43-101 and Australia’s Joint Ore Reserve Committee (JORC), Nature’s Vault first determines that there is gold in an ore body.
Then, using blockchain and asset fractionalization, the mineral rights and quantified in-ground gold associated with these mineral rights are tokenized.
This way, gold for investment can still be used without the emission-intensive process that goes into mining it. Therefore, these digital assets are an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional gold investments.
Click here to learn more about gold in Nature’s Vault.
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