In fact, some European countries have emissions not far from the global average: In 2017 emissions in Portugal are 5.3 tonnes; 5.5t in France; and 5.8t per person in the UK. This is also much lower than some of their neighbours with similar standards of living, such as Germany, the Netherlands, or Belgium.
Saudi Arabia - 17.50 tons per person. Kazakhstan - 17.03 tons per person. *Australia and the United States place 11 and 12 on the per-capital list. **Source: ourworldindata.org. Further
This is because the emissions growth recorded in China and India suggests that citizens of these countries are now the biggest contributors to climate change. In reality, however, even after the dramatic growth recorded over the past three decades, per capita emissions remain higher in both Europe (7.3 MtCO2) and the US (16.1 MtCO2) than China
In 2020, EU's consumption-based COâ‚‚-emissions are estimated at 3.2 billion tonnes. More than 70% of those originate from the EU economy itself. Some 10% originate from non-EU and non-G20 countries (rest of the World grouping in Table 2). With 6.6 %, China is the single country with the biggest share in EU's consumption-based COâ‚‚-emissionsTotal household carbon footprint across 177 EU regions in tonnes of CO2 equivalent, encompassing both direct and embodied emissions. Note that only national averages are shown for Sweden and the Netherlands. Source: Ivanova et.al 2017. As for the per capita map, this also clearly shows large differences in emissions between regions.
An increasing number of countries, sub-national governments and companies, have made net-zero GHG emissions pledges. As of 1 September 2022, net-zero targets have been adopted or proposed by 136 countries and the European Union (Figure 3). These targets cover around 83% of global carbon emissions.Mo5nX.