Historic CO2 Emissions

As discussed in the audio that follows, some countries are responsibile for far more of the planet’s CO2 burden than others. Those countries have grown rich through producing carbon dioxide. This has important implications for their responsiblity for financing climate action by other countries.

This graphic is made available copyright free by Our World in Data. It shows the distribution of cumulative emissions around the world. Treemaps are used to compare entities (such as countries or regions) in relation to others, and relative to the total. Here countries are presented as rectangles and colored by region. The size of each rectangle corresponds to the sum of CO2 emissions from a country between 1751 and 2017. Combined, all rectangles represent the global total.