2025 Worldwide GHG Emissions, visualized in a variwide chart;
based on JRC/IEA Report “GHG Emissions of All World Countries 2026“;
click image to enlarge; click here to download a PDF

The 2025 emissions data

The usual account of emissions growth has two countries in it. China built the coal fleet, India followed, and the rich world — whatever else it was doing — was bending its own curve downward.

The 2025 data does not read that way.

Global greenhouse gas emissions reached 54.1 Gt CO₂eq, up 0.71% on 2024. Population grew faster, at 0.94%. So the per-person figure fell, from 6.63 to 6.62 tonnes.

20242025Change
Global GHG emissions53.8 Gt CO₂eq54.1 Gt CO₂eq+0.71%
World population8.11 bn8.18 bn+0.94%
Average per capita6.63 t CO₂eq6.62 t CO₂eq−0.23%
Median per capita4.56 t CO₂eq4.51 t CO₂eq−1.00%

The distribution

That 6.62 is worth distrusting before anything is built on it. The median person emits 4.51 t. Here is what the average flattens.

Per capita (t CO₂eq)× median
United States17.53.89
China11.12.46
Germany8.011.78
EU-277.061.57
France5.651.25
India3.110.689
Africa excl. South Africa1.970.436

Qatar vs. DR Congo: The Extreme Ends of Emissions

At the ends of that chart, Qatar emits 54.8 t CO₂eq per person and the Democratic Republic of the Congo emits 0.545. That ratio is 101×. On the same revised data it was 99.6× in 2024, so the distance between the highest and lowest per-capita emitter has crossed one hundred to one.

Where the increase came from

The world added 380 Mt CO₂eq in 2025. The United States added 131 Mt of it.

That is 34.6% of the year’s increase, from 4.19% of the world’s people — by a country already emitting 17.5 t per person. No other group in the dataset comes close. The next largest addition is Other Africa at 50.5 Mt, spread across 885 million people.

Meanwhile:

  • China: +0.05%. Flat, on 1.45 billion people, and per capita edged down.
  • India: −0.15%. Not growth at a slower rate. A total 6.8 Mt lower than the year before, which is as close to flat as this dataset can resolve.
  • EU-27: −0.24%, to 7.06 t per person.
  • Japan −1.43%. Italy −2.27%. France −1.95%. Australia −1.33%. South Africa −1.89%. Brazil −0.86%.

Set against those, the risers are mostly fossil producers and fast-growing middle-income economies: Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan together +5.54%, Nigeria +4.80%, Türkiye +4.16%, the small Gulf states +2.54%.

The data does not say why American emissions rose. It says that they did, by more than any other single group, in a year when most of the OECD went the other way.

There is a second count in the same direction, and it is invisible in every headline figure. Of the 38 groups on the diagram, 20 saw per-capita emissions fall — and those 20 hold 57.6% of the world’s population. More than half of humanity now lives somewhere the per-person number is going down.

The per-capita number is not the win it looks like

It would be easy to read the falling global average as progress arriving. The long record says otherwise: per-person emissions have fallen in 27 of the last 55 years, including through the 1990s, while the absolute total climbed almost without interruption. Population growth alone produces the effect whenever emissions grow more slowly than people do.

What matters is the total, and the total went up.

Two lines outside every national account

International aviation rose 5.05% in 2025, adding 30.5 Mt — the second-fastest rise in the release, behind Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. International shipping rose 1.96%. Neither sits inside any country’s national accounts, and neither is falling.

Germany and France

The distribution table has a pair in it worth stopping on. Germany emits 8.01 t CO₂eq per person. France emits 5.65. Two neighboring economies, comparable living standards, similar climates, both among the world’s ten largest — and one emits 41.9% more per head than the other.

The dominant variable is electricity. France runs about two-thirds of its grid on nuclear power. Germany shut down its last three reactors in April 2023. The advantage sits almost entirely in the power sector; in transport and industry the two countries look much alike.

Both fell in 2025 — France by 1.95%, Germany by 0.24%. Read the gap between them as a moral verdict and you miss what it offers. One structural decision about how to make electricity, a 42% difference in what each citizen emits, on a timescale a government can act within.

Economic Development within the Net-zero Framework and Honoring Planetary Boundaries

Regions like India, South America, and Africa remain below the global average in per capita emissions, but their speedy economic and demographic growth is elevating their emissions. A rise in these countries’ per capita emissions to the global average would increase worldwide emissions by 33%. To secure a sustainable future, such growth must align with achieving net-zero targets while respecting planetary boundaries globally.

What this doesn’t say

One year is not a trend, and EDGAR’s own revisions are why. The 2024 figure published in last year’s report has been revised up by 563 Mt. Both years above use the revised series, so the change is measured like against like — but a 0.71% increase is small enough that next year’s revision could move it.

What is harder to revise away is the shape of the year: the increase concentrated in one wealthy country while China and India held flat.

If that shape holds, the work of bending the global line has moved to a country with the capital, the engineers, and the factory space to do it — and France has already shown what one such decision is worth.

by Thomas Schulz and Mariana Bozesan, AQAL Foundation, Munich

Methodology

Emissions data from EDGAR (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research), European Commission Joint Research Centre, reference year 2025, all greenhouse gases on a GWP-100 basis using IPCC AR5 values. Figures reproduced without adjustment.

Crippa, M., Guizzardi, D., Pagani, F., Banja, M., Ciarlantini, S. et al., GHG emissions of all world countries — 2026 Report, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2026, doi:10.2760/7717504, JRC147815. Report: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2026. Dataset: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_ghg2026.

Electricity figures from Ember, Global Electricity Review 2026 (https://ember-energy.org), and the IEA.

Revision. JRC revised its 2024 estimate upward by 563 Mt CO₂eq (+1.06%), from 53.2 to 53.8 Gt. All 2024 figures here use the revised series. Comparisons to the 2024 annual report will therefore differ from the numbers published there.

Territories are consolidated into 38 groups covering 208 territories; group membership follows the report’s standing definitions. The median is population-weighted and describes a level, not a place. Per-capita rankings exclude territories below one million people, except where named individually on the chart.

How to understand the variwide chart

This type of visualization answers immediately questions like

  • “Which countries are the largest GHG emitters?”
  • “How significant is the spread between per capita emissions in different countries?”
  • “Which countries are reducing their GHG emissions?”
  • “Which countries are still increasing their GHG emissions?”
  • What are the world’s average per capita GHG emissions (arithmetic mean)?
  • What are the GHG emissions of the average human (arithmetic median)?

The variwide chart allows the visualization of a multitude of data dimensions in one easy-to-read diagram. These data dimensions are: 

  1. Individual country data, such as China, South Africa, or the USA, or a group of countries such as the Middle East or Africa,
  2. Population by country or group of countries, 
  3. Per capita GHG emissions, and 
  4. GHG emissions growth year-over-year

The total GHG emissions of a region are represented as a rectangular area. The height of each rectangle is proportional to the GHG emissions per capita and the width is proportional to the population of the represented region. The regions are sorted by GHG emissions per capita, from the highest to the lowest.

The per capita emission average is indicated by the horizontal line, the median by the dotted horizontal line.

The colors of the rectangles indicate their year-over-year growth rate: “heating up” is represented from light red to dark red, and “cooling down” goes from light blue to dark blue.

2025 Worldwide GHG Emissions (per capita; by region; growth), variwide chart by Thomas Schulz is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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