UK emissions already surpassing other countries!

An Oxfam report on 6th January highlighted the fact that the per capita emissions for the UK had already surpassed Rwanda's expected total for the whole year!

With UK citizens averaging over 8 tonnes of carbon emissions per year (2017 data), it only took us 5 days of the new year to surpass what Rwanda would expect to generate, per person, in an entire year. Beyond that, by the 12th of the month, we would have gone past the annual figures for Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Madagascar, Guinea and Burkina Faso!

Oxfam-GB Chief Executive, Danny Sriskandarajah, said, "The sheer scale of global inequality when it comes to carbon emissions is staggering." This would appear to be borne out by a quick check of some of those 2017 figures;

• UK - 8.34t per capita, per year
• Rwanda - 0.09t per capita, per year
• Burkina Faso - 0.25t per capita, per year
• Nigeria - 0.49t per capita, per year
• India - 1.68t per capita, per year
• Global Average - 4.7t per capita, per yea

Oxfam commissioned a YouGov poll to find out more about what Britons feel on the subject, with the overall consensus that we are concerned, with many worried about climate change impacts and wanting to do more.

• 79% said that they are more likely to recycle more
• 38% said they might change their diet (e.g. less meat and dairy)
• 2/3 said they use more energy efficient products and/or renewable energy providers
• Around 1/2 said they are trying to limit their air travel
• 61% say they want the government to do more to fight the climate emergency

That last one is always is a bit of a cop-out; yes, the government needs to be leading the way, but we all have a role to play and it will be consumer pressure that ultimately drives businesses to make the big everyday changes we need to see for meaningful change; ultimately it is us who decide when and where we travel, what type of energy we power our houses with and if we ethically / environmentally source our clothes.

"As the UK government gets ready to host global climate talks this year, it needs to show that it is deadly serious about leading the fight against climate change," says Sriskandarajah.

What does it really mean?
In actuality, despite this frightening statistic, the UK is actually only ranked 36th in the world for CO2 emissions per capita! So despite our average being almost twice the global average, there are still 35 more countries with worse per capita rates than us.

The Global Carbon Atlas - here - is a great tool to play around with if you have any interest, and where most of the statistics for the post have originated from.

18 of the 20 nations at the bottom of this list are in Africa, while the Top 3 looks like this;

1. Luxembourg - 40t per capita
2. Qatar - 30t per capita
3. Trinidad & Tobago - 27t per capita

All of the top 25 on this list are averaging over 10 tonnes CO2 per capita! But you will notice that these three most 'troublesome' countries, are all tiny - so perhaps this metric is a little misleading?

Other charts:
So, let us look at some of the other ways in which they measure emissions, and see if that helps give a slightly more realistic perspective.

When measured against GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the list changes, but perhaps not how you may expect. The Top 10 in this list now has 3 Asian countries (Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan), 4 from Africa (Togo, South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana), 2 from Europe (Ukraine, Estonia) and only 1 from North America (and that is Trinidad again, in the Caribbean, rather than the mainland).

1. Trinidad & Tobago - 0.93 kgCO2/GDP
2. Kyrgyzstan - 0.80 kgCOP2/GDP
3. Ukraine - 0.71 kgCO2/GDP

The USA pops up at number 30, with a rate of 0.333 kgCO2/GDP - while the UK is way down at 80th position, with a rate of 0.21 kgCO2/GDP. In this set of (2017) data, there are over 100 countries with no data measured.

The GDP way balances emissions against how industrialised a country is becoming, so it is perhaps no surprise that it is largely what we would see as developing countries having high emissions measured against low, or growing, economies - whereas more (so-called) western nations have large economies to balance their emissions against (which also means they have the capacity to start carbon reduction programmes which may be viewed as more of a luxury in some nations).

The 'actual' truth:
So the last way to look at this, is perhaps the crudest - just plain old, straight up 'actual' emissions. What a country emits, regardless of how big it is, how much money it makes, or how many people live there.

This chart gives us a chart that perhaps makes more sense to what we know about the world - here are the Top 5 for 2017;

1. China - 8549 mtCO2 (megatons)
2. USA - 5687 mtCO2
3. India - 2260 mtCO2
4. Japan - 1393 mtCO2
5. Russia - 1373 mtCO2

The UK sits at 12th in this list (557mt), which makes sense when judged against other countries we might view as being similar. Germany is sixth (895mt) and France 17th (459mt); emerging nation, Brazil, is 14th at 513mt.

When we now look at some of those nations on the other lists, through this window, we see a different picture.

• Qatar - 47th - 82mt
• Trinidad & Tobago - 66th - 37mt
• Luxembourg - 73rd - 24mt
• Kyrgyzstan - 88th - 16mt

The difficulty now is that developing nations want the 'luxuries' that fossil fuels brought the western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - but because we now know the problems that brings, we are effectively telling them they can't have that! We need to find ways to try and give such countries the way of life they want, but in as sustainable a way as possible.


Research:
https://transform.iema.net/article/uk-emissions-already-outstrip-rwandas-annual-total-2020-oxfam?redirectcounter=1
http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/british-carbon-footprint-africa-emissions-oxfam-climate-change-a9271861.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/05/britain-annual-carbon-emissions-overtake-africa-two-weeks-oxfam