China's emissions of carbon dioxide are so immense that its difficult to fully grasp their scale. However, thanks to the United Nations, we have a unique set of data that makes it possible to visualize how immense its CO₂ emissions are compared to other nations.

That data was presented in the form of a table, which doesn't quite do the numbers justice. We've taken a portion of that data and visualized it, comparing China's carbon dioxide output to the combined CO₂ emissions of several of the world's major economic regions during 2023. In the following chart, those emissions are measured in millions of metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (MtCO2e) greenhouse gases, which factors together the contributions of several gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect in the Earth's atmosphere.

What makes this data unique is that China's output of 16,000 MtCO2e for 2023 coincidentally matches the combined output of carbon emissions from the United States, India, the 27 nations of the European Union, and the Russian Federation. That's something that's not easy to see in the table of numbers presented in the UN's Emissions Gap Report, but it leaps out when you visually compare the emissions side-by-side in a simple bar chart.

China's estimated population in 2023 was 1,413,142,846 people, which compares with a combined population of 2,331,402,007 for the United States, India, European Union, and Russian Federation. China's per capita emissions total 11.32 metric tons of CO2e, which is nearly 65% larger than the 6.86 metric tons of CO2e per capita emissions for the major economic regions featured in the chart whose combined total emissions equal those of China.

References

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air… please! Table ES.1 (and Table 2.2) Total, per capita and historical emissions of selected countries and regions. DOI: 10.59117/20.500.11822/46404. 24 October 2024.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook (2023 Archive). Field Listing - Population. [Online Data]. 28 December 2023.

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