The Global Carbon Budget offers a wealth of data on carbon dioxide emissions. That includes estimates of how CO₂ each nation has emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in each year since 1850. The latest edition of the report covers emissions from that year through 2024.
But that's not the whole story for atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. When carbon dioxide is emitted into the air, it enters into the planet's carbon cycle, which extracts a portion of the emitted carbon dioxide from the air. These natural processes then play out slowly over decades, centuries, and millennia.
It's possible to estimate how much of a given year's emissions still remain in the Earth's air.
The following chart reveals both the total historic emissions of carbon dioxide and the portion of those emissions that is still present in the air from the modern day territories of the United Kingdom, India, the European Union, China, the United States, and the combined rest of the world for emissions produced in the years from 1850 through 2024.
Here are the percentages to indicate the portion of each territory's total historic emissions from 1850 through 2024 that remain in the Earth's atmosphere:
- United Kingdom: 49.3%
- India: 78.6%
- European Union: 55.7%
- China: 78.5%
- United States: 57.8%
- Rest of the World: 66.4%
The following treemap chart visualizes each territory's share of the amount of excess carbon dioxide (defined as that coming from fossil fuel combustion in the years from 1850 through 2024) that is still in the air today:
In the three years from 2021 to 2024, China's share has risen from 17.3% to 18.5%, while the United States' share has declined from 22.3% to 21.4%. With those opposing trends, we project China's emissions that remain in the air will surpass those of the United States in 2031, the timing of which is unchanged from what we projected three years ago.
References
Friedlingstein et al. Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth System Science Data, 13 May 2026. DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026.
Political Calculations. How Long Does Carbon Dioxide Stay in the Atmosphere? [Online Article, Tool]. 19 July 2023.
Political Calculations. How Much Fossil Fuel CO2 Is in the Air? [Online Article]. 15 August 2023.
Political Calculations. Who Made the Excess Carbon Dioxide in Today's Air?. [Online Article]. 29 September 2023.
Image credit: Carbon Cycle by NASA on Wikimedia Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal Deed.
Labels: data visualization, environment
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