CO2 emissions per capita
Territorial CO2 emissions divided by population, in tonnes per person.
How it is measured
Computed from the emissions and population series.
Where the number came from
Dividing national emissions by population became standard once climate negotiations turned to burden sharing, because a per-capita figure is the natural way to express the claim that every person has an equal entitlement to the atmosphere. That claim, advanced forcefully by developing countries from the early 1990s, is why the per-person column exists alongside the national total rather than as a footnote to it: the two support opposite arguments about who should cut first. The measure inherits every property of the territorial accounting behind it, and adds one of its own, namely that it is a ratio of an industrial quantity to a demographic one and can therefore be moved by either. A country can improve its position by decarbonising or by growing its population, and the indicator will not distinguish the two.
Worked example: Qatar at 41 tonnes per person
Our 2024 figures put Qatar at about 41.3 tonnes per person, Kuwait near 26.2 and Brunei close behind, against the United States at roughly 14.2, Germany about 6.8, China about 8.7 and India about 2.2. Qatar is therefore, on this measure, about nineteen times as carbon-intensive per person as India. What produces that number is worth understanding before quoting it. Qatar’s emissions are dominated by liquefied natural gas: chilling gas to minus 162 degrees for shipment is enormously energy-hungry, and the associated flaring adds more, so a large share of the total is industrial processing whose product is burned somewhere else entirely and counted against the buyer’s total, not Qatar’s. That industry sits on a population of a few million, a majority of whom are migrant workers. The result is a numerator sized by a global export industry and a denominator sized by a small resident population, which is a formula for an extreme ratio rather than a description of Qatari households. The comparison that does most of the honest work in this table is the one between countries of broadly similar structure: the United States at roughly 14.2 against Germany at about 6.8 is two large, rich, industrialised democracies differing by a factor of two, and that gap is about energy mix, transport and building stock rather than about accounting.
Figures read from our own co2 emissions per capita table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
Our World in Data, CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (CC BY 4.0), with the World Bank series as fallback.
Refresh cadence: Annual; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
Small petrostates (Qatar, Kuwait) top this table partly because gas flaring and LNG plants count against small populations. The denominator is resident population, so a country whose workforce is largely non-resident, or whose industry serves export markets, carries emissions its residents did not consume.