Sovereign and dependent territory rows of OWID’s “CO₂ emissions per capita” dataset (top 30 by most recent year). Values in tonnes per person (two decimals). Aggregates excluded.
Chart ready. Press play to start.
How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “CO₂ per Capita by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by Our World in Data (mostly re-published World Bank / UN public statistics) (OWID Grapher slug “co-emissions-per-capita”). Values are expressed in tonnes per person.
What to watch. The top is not China or the United States but Qatar, Bahrain and other small oil-and-gas states — dividing by population redraws the map of climate responsibility. Watch Western Europe drift steadily downward from the 2000s while the Gulf stays high.
Caveats. Per-capita values swing hardest in small-population states, and extraction-stage emissions such as gas flaring are booked to residents regardless of their lifestyles. Read this alongside the absolute-emissions ranking before drawing conclusions about any country.
Trends in the data
This series begins in 1750, but the left-hand edge is almost empty. Only Australia has a value in 1750, and it is 0.00; by 1871 there are still just six countries. The leaders that year are the United States at 2.52 tonnes, Australia at 0.80 and Canada at 0.47 — two orders of magnitude below today’s 40-plus. More than a century after the industrial revolution began, per-person emissions were still at that level.
By 1948 the prominence of oil producers has already begun. Bahrain leads at 39.56 tonnes, followed by Trinidad and Tobago at 20.63, the United States at 17.94 and Canada at 12.02. Bahrain that year was already at roughly the level Qatar reaches in 2024 (41.27 tonnes). In the same year China stood at 0.07 tonnes, South Korea at 0.09 and Luxembourg at 0.17 — a gap of more than 500× between oil producers and everyone else.
The 2024 leaders are Qatar at 41.27, Kuwait 26.25, Brunei 26.05, Bahrain 24.27 and Trinidad and Tobago 22.93, all oil or gas producers. Flaring during extraction, cheap domestic energy supporting high consumption, and small populations combine to produce extreme per-person values. Below them come Australia at 14.48, the United States 14.20, Canada 13.42 and Mongolia 12.86 — two to three times lower than the leaders. Australia, the only country in the table in 1750 and therefore first, is 11th in 2024.
The 30-country average is 15.22 tonnes in 2024. Its historical maximum, incidentally, is 39.69 tonnes in 1954, which reflects the small number of reporting countries at the time and the extreme values of oil producers pulling the mean up. The more countries report, the lower the average goes. Never read the path of the average in a series like this as “the world trend”. Read it alongside the total-emissions ranking — and note that because the top 30 is cut at about 8.51 tonnes for 2024, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan are absent, which is the flip side of emitting less.
Trivia quiz
Why can a country that is not a top total emitter still rank high in CO2 emissions per capita?
Because of population size. Totals are dominated by populous nations, while per-capita figures favour small, energy-intensive countries such as oil producers. (Source)
Many Middle Eastern countries have very high per-capita CO2. What economic feature do they share?
They are oil and gas producers. Energy-intensive economies combined with small populations push per-capita emissions up. (Source)
What term describes balancing emissions with removals so that net greenhouse-gas emissions are zero?
Carbon neutrality (net zero). Many countries target it around the middle of this century. (Source)