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Aggregate Contributions of Major GHG Emitting Countries: 2000

December 1, 2005
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Aggregate Contributions of Major GHG Emitting Countries: 2000View Large Size

Note: this chart has been updated with 2005 data.

This chart shows how emissions from the major emitting countries contribute to the world total. Together, the 25 countries with the largest GHG emissions accounted for approximately 83 percent of global emissions in 2000.

Sources & Notes
WRI, CAIT. All data is for the year 2000. Moving from left to right, countries are added in the order of their absolute emissions with the largest being added first. Figures exclude CO2 from land-use change and forestry and emissions from international bunker fuels.

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3 Comments

Comments expressed on this page are opinions of the authors themselves, and not positions of the World Resources Institute. WRI reserves the right to remove any comments that it considers inappropriate or spam.

It would be more instructive

By SolarNow on September 15, 2008

It would be more instructive to split out China from the EU-25.

I agree that it would be

By Hubert Murray on September 21, 2008

I agree that it would be better to separate China from the EU for the reason that we are talking about politics as much as we are about science. Just as the US has its own category it would be instructive to understand the relative values of those two quite distinct political blocks (EU-25 and China) so that one could see the size of the problem.

Thanks to both of your for

By Tim Herzog on September 22, 2008

Thanks to both of your for your comments. This would certainly be a good thing for an update to this graph (the data is from 2000). However, the point of the chart is not to single out any particular country. Rather, it is to point out that while there are nearly 200 parties to the UNFCCC, when it comes to the question of GHGs and where they come from, only 25 or so countries are significant. So the chart is intended to focus on those 25 countries as a group.

If you are interested in individual country emissions check out the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool at http://cait.wri.org.