World carbon dioxide emissions data by country: China speeds ahead of the rest

World carbon dioxide emissions are one way of measuring a country’s economic growth too.

And the latest figures – published by the respected Energy Information Administration – show CO2 emissions from energy consumption – the vast majority of Carbon Dioxide produced.

A reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions is not only the goal of environmentalists but also of pretty much every government in the world.Currently 192 countries have adopted the Kyoto protocol. One fo the aims is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% of the 1990 levels by 2012 collectively forcountries starred on this list.

The map, above (you can get it as a PDF file here) is produced by Guardian graphic artists Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton. It shows a world where established economies have large – but declining – carbon emissions. While the new economic giants are growing rapidly. This newly-released data is from 2009 – the latest available.

On pure emissions alone, the key points are:

• China emits more CO2 than the US and Canada put together – up by 171% since the year 2000
• The US has had declining CO2 for two years running, the last time the US had declining CO2 for 3 years running was in the 1980s
• The UK is down one place to tenth on the list, 8% on the year. The country is now behind Iran, South Korea, Japan and Germany
• India is now the world’s third biggest emitter of CO2 – pushing Russia into fourth place
• The biggest decrease from 2008-2009 is Ukraine – down 28%. The biggest increase is the Cook Islands – up 66.7%

But that is only one way to look at the data – and it doesn’t take account of how many people live in each country. If you look at per capita emissions, a different picture emerges where:

• Some of the world’s smallest countries and islands emit the most per person – the highest being Gibraltar with 152 tonnes per person
• The US is still number one in terms of per capita emissions among the big economies – with 18 tonnes emitted per person
• China, by contrast, emits under six tonnes per person, India only 1.38
• For comparison, the whole world emits 4.49 tonnes per person

There are other sources of emissions data too, if you want to compare – albeit not as up-to-date:

• The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) gathers the data on world carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is only available up to 2008.
• the International Energy Agency (IEA) has global carbon emissions data up to 2008

But what can we say about this data and how close we are to the collective targets in the Kyoto agreement?

The Kyoto protocol target emission does not include, but this EIA data does. You can’t tell this from the notes on the data, but the EIA confirmed to us this was the case.

We can determine what the so called ‘bunker fuels’ are from the data here.

But only looking at carbon dioxide emissions doesn’t give us the total for all greenhouse gases.

So we’ll have to wait until the UNFCCC publishes the results of global greenhouse gasses collated data before we can draw any firm conclusions about meeting the Kyoto agreements.

The full data is below, going right back to 1980. What can you do with it?

Data summary

Download the data

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet, 1980 to 2009, (with ISO codes)

More data

Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian