The largest absolute CO2 emission increases between 19 came from emerging economies, most notably China, and to a smaller extent India, amongst other countries. The second pair of cartograms show how individual countries have been contributing to these increases, and to a much smaller extent which countries managed a relative decline in that period. Nevertheless, ever since the agreement was signed, CO₂ emissions have been steadily rising, largely fuelled by considerable global economic growth. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the first serious effort to not only acknowledging a role of humans in global warming, but to also implement measures to reducing this impact. The political commitment to such changes has always been at the centre of global conventions on climate change that are adopted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. For concerted action towards tackling climate change, the largest contributors would obviously have the biggest impact in reducing their emissions. Such patterns can be observed around the world, so that the maintaining or even increasing economic output – usually with increased emissions as a trade-off – lies in the national interest of many countries. These relative contributions are used as negotiating positions that emerging (as well as developing) countries need to increase emissions in order to achieve economic success. At the same time these three countries differ significantly in their relative contribution: The USA is with 15.56 tons CO₂ per capita among the worst contributors, while China has approximately half (7.45) and India a fraction of that (1.92).
The three countries account for approximately half the quantity of emissions in this dataset. By absolute quantity, China is the largest contributor, followed by the USA and India. Overlaid are the relative emissions in tons per capita in that year. The data shown in the first cartogram displays each country of the world resized by their total fossil CO₂ emissions (excluding effects of deforestation which accounts for 11 per cent of these emissions). At global summits these different strategies are negotiated, since major contributors and those countries most vulnerable follow very different national interests.Ī map of the global CO₂ emissions in 2016 provides an insight into the side of the ‘culprits’, who themselves can be viewed from different angles. Since climate change itself is a global phenomenon, mere national interventions are not sufficient in tackling the effects of climate change. Strategies of mitigation as well as adaptation to the negative consequences of climate change are eventually a task for national politics.
#MAP OF THE WORLD AFTER CLIMATE CHANGE HOW TO#
The need for immediate political action is widely accepted and before the USA’s withdrawal from the 2015 Accord de Paris (Paris Agreement) could be seen as a global political consensus on the issue, even if disagreements on the best solutions have always existed.ĭisagreements circle around the question of how to reduce CO₂ emissions as a major contributor to the underlying environmental problems. Responses of the global geo- and biosphere to global warming are documented in an ever-growing number of studies that leave little doubt of the environmental impact and the influences that the modern industrial society has on climate variability. In what appears to be intensive and turbulent times in politics that the Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney has labelled as examples for recurring protectionism and ‘de-globalisation’ it appears an impossible political challenge to address global environmental issues such as climate change in a concerted transnational effort.
But national political interests have consistently curbed international efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions. Climate change is a challenge for the whole world.
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