Visualizing CO2 Emissions and Global Economic Growth

The Global Carbon Project issued its Global Carbon Budget for 2024 on 13 November 2024. The report provides a wealth of data on the sources of carbon emissions, but very little of that data links those emissions to economic activities. One exception to that rule however is the following chart, which presents total emissions of CO₂ with the relative “intensity” of CO₂ emissions, measured as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each dollar of global GDP recorded (in terms of constant 2017 U.S. dollars) from 1960 through 2024.

The chart is intresting because we’ve taken a different approach to visualizing how carbon dioxide emissions change in response to major economic and environmental events. Here’s our version that tracks the pace of the year-over-year change in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which provides a more sensitive measure over the same timespan that we present against a color-coded backdrop indicating major economic events:

As 2024 comes to an end, we find the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is rising. It has not yet achieved the same height as what this measure did in 2016 thanks to that year’s El Niño event and the related wildfires in Indonesia, but may surpass it before it might finally reverse.

The wildcard right now is China and how that nation’s government will respond to its economic challenges. In 2018-19 and again after 2023, the government has actively stimuluated its economy, and CO₂ emissions to offset the negative impact of its 2018-19 tariff war with the United States and to recover from the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. China is, be a very wide margin, the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to human economic activities. When it acts to stimulate its economy, the results show up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

References

Global Carbon Project. Global Carbon Budget 2024. 13 November 2024. Preprint DOI: 10.5194/essd-2024-519.

Global Carbon Project. Supplemental data of Global Carbon Budget 2024 (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Global Carbon Project. 13 November 2024. DOI: 10.18160/gcp-2024.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 December 2024. Accessed 5 December 2024.