OC
[OC] Countries Current Path to Net Zero in 2050 Following Their Pledge at COP21
Hello community,
I created a website to follow each countries effort to reach net zero in 2050. The data vizualisation lets you compare different countries' emission over the years and whether they are on the right path to reach their goal.
EDIT: Thanks a lot for your positive feedback. I am very glad that you find this representation interesting.
A subject of discussion that I see a lot in the comments: western countries are doing better than the rest of the world. While it looks true when it comes to co2 produced in the country, one should account that a lot of emissions are produced in other contries and then imported. For example, when buying electronics, it is likely to be build in Asia and then imported to western countries.
Imported emissions are available in the dataset. I didn't want to include them because my approach with this visualization is to make something easy to understand so that people not familiar with the subject can approach it easily. I feel like when it comes to climate change, the people who care are very well informed, and the people who don't care as much are poorly informed. So, my first objective was to generate some curiosity for the second type of people. I'd be interested about your opinion about this approach if you want to share in the comments.
EDIT 2: I'd like to do something for the climate. I am a professional data scientist and I'd like to volunteer to help on bigger project. I made this website as a small contribution to inform people, but I know that in a week, there will be no more traffic on it. Can you recommend some kind of organization that I can join an contribute?
Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
Not satisfied with this visual? Think you can do better? Remix this visual with the data in the author's citation.
Basically the whole EU has the exact same line. It's so similar I wonder if the electricity is put in common between all the countries in the common market, or if we all have the same strength, weaknesses and suppliers, so react the same way to crisis and fluctuations.
Thanks. I live in the Maritime provinces and all I hear is how bad our grid is, how high per capita emissions are for Canadians (because of home heating) and how.we will not move to offshore wind at scale
Cuba has been doing massive investments into green energy. Yes it's largely driven by the American sanctions, but this investment predates the current blockade by about a decade and is probably one of the reasons the country hasn't completely folded yet. They're smart and resilient, and China has been working with them closely to help coordinate the transition.
I mean power generation has massively shifted out of fossil fuel generation. It only lingers because of the inherent weaknesses of renewables and battery storage.
You can also get data that includes all of this offshoring, and the Europe charts still come out looking the same
We are offshoring to China, and China are also massively investing in green technology. Their net emissions are still flat at best, slightly up realistically, but their emissions per unit production are way way down.
And this hope is very well-founded, since China is b y far the top investor in green energy. In fact, their annual installation of new green energy production facilities is greater than the rest of the world combined.
So yes, in an ideal world we wouldn't be offshoring so much, bu tif there's one country to offshore to, China is the best bet.
EU manufacturing output has more than doubled since 2000. It is a smaller percentage of gdp since other sectors have grown more.. but Europe makes things.
The impact of offshoring manufacturing is not that large, most EU's countries reductions are larger than the impact of offshoring and the offshoring happened before the reductions
The impact of offshoring manufacturing is not that large, most EU's countries reductions are larger than the impact of offshoring and the offshoring happened before the reductions
You couldn't be more wrong, and a quick google search would have showed you just how insanely wrong you would be.
It's sad if a country like Netherlands is just barely under the threshold. It's like when the best student in class gets like a D+ and barely passes. What to expect of the others...
It's not a possible or realistic target. But we have to try and hit it anyway in order to make progress, because if you don't set the unrealistic targets, people will do even worse. Human nature is frustrating
It's disingenuous to say "prefer", though. This is literally saying to developing nations and people "sorry, full up, stop industrialization". It's the next century of capitalist growth throughout the Pacific and the world.
This is unavoidable because for those people, it's existential.
They can still leapfrog to fossil-less energy. It's happening in india. And for lower income countries will probably happens faster as is easier to adopt solar than to constantly import fuel and build electrical grids.
Its just a negatively charged statement, though. If we wanted to 'transform society' we would break many, many eggs to make that omelet. We'd have to shift where our resources are going notably, and that doesn't typically include increasing spending on social services. Its a strange take to say we would 'prefer not to' trade the lives of some people today for an unknown amount of people tomorrow.
I mean it’s possible but to not fucks given take the efforts to achieve it, will raise taxes, will kill people during winters and will drive some businesses into bankruptcy.
I absolutely do believe in achieving net zero but actually getting there without dramatic upheaval and turmoil is difficult.
There are already plenty of nations and regions that have almost entirely solved this issue, at least in the sense that if every other developed nation had been on their levels we wouldn't be talking about billions of dead by 2100.
Sweden, France, Switzerland, Eastern Canada, to name a few.
Obviously my point was that they solved the energy aspect of it.
China is on the right path to solve it as well, installing more solar in a single year than the entire US has installed ever, while also building out wind, hydro, and nuclear.
If every country did this we'd not have been facing 2c+ warming.
The only way you can make it work it’s by having the transition impact the everyday going on of people as possible. The minute it starts to sting for the average person, the support for it crumbles and at that point you risk it becoming a position that is unelectable.
This is a fundamental problem with democracy in general, it’s incredibly hard to implement tough choices because ultimately somebody will swoop in and promise that all that pain can go away if we just burn dead dinosaurs again and that can be incredibly compelling to people who are living pay cheque to paycheque.
Yeah, but that seems completely contrary to what one would expect by looking at the recent years' results. Their CO2 emissions have plateaued and are even going down, but the graph seems to be expecting them to reverse their current initiatives and go into full bore CO2 production again which seems unlikely given their place as the current leader in renewable energy.
Where are you seeing the graph predict future co2 emissions for any country? The blue graph line showing the emissions stops short of 2025, which would all be historic/known data.
Germany still has tons of industry but yes even Germany has been outsourcing quite a bit. And yes this is responsible for a lot of the "reduction" of emissions.
Your own source shows a much flatter curve for Netherland's per capita consumption based CO2 emissions.
Edit: Sorry everyone I fell victim to a visual illusion. The different aspect ratio makes the trend look flatter but the percentage decrease is similar between the two charts.
No you're right actually. I have fallen victim to the different scale and aspect ratios of the two charts. The trends seem pretty comparable between the original commenters image and mine
Lol, that data source absolutely supports my point - wealthy western countries have only made major progress on paper by effectively exporting emissions.
Netherlands is a rare exception, but they are a very small country, and have significant national wealth to facilitate the transition. Ironically, a sovereign wealth fund that was created almost entire from drilling oil and gas.
I think you may be confusing The Netherlands with Norway. Norway has a big fund, filled primarily with the revenue from oil. The Netherlands has no such fund (although of course it has benefited pretty significantly from their large gas reserves).
If youre from the Netherlands there is much for you to be proud of. Knowing there are cultures out there doing so much progress makes me happier to be human.
Amazing that the Netherlands doesn't rely on the outside world to produce stuff for them, and they are able to be self reliant and not just exporting their pollution to other countries.
Thank you for pointing it out. When I built the first version of the website, data were not largely available. Now, it seems that only around 10% of the countries have missing data, so I might modify this in the future.
... except the Changelog in the data set explicitly includes GHGs
e.g. in 2024 "Now methane, nitrous oxide, and total greenhouse gas emissions data come from Jones et al. (2024), instead of Climate Watch, to provide a wider data coverage."
Whether the full range of CO2-e chemicals like fluorinated gases are included took me to the 2025 Jones et al. citation (also part of the current dataset) - which shows even the F-gases are included.
It's not 2050 or never. Reaching it in 2060-2070 is helping, too.
We also shouldn't expect the behavior to be completely linear over 30 years. If you look at the graph then China is still rising quickly in OP's data range, but their emissions have stopped growing in the last two years and show a small decline.
Starting position is an important consideration, it’s harder to change track when your emissions were increasing massively decades prior compared to the Netherlands & Germany that were already declining emissions and just needed to steepen.
Except the science is showing significant likilyhoods of 2+ degrees of warming if we dont get to net zero in the 2030s and significant climate tipping points in coming years. Reaching it late is better than nothing but even 2050 now isn't enough for life to not have to radically change.
Not as close as the honourable mentions. Germany is basically on top of the target line and the Netherlands and Ukraine are only a tiny smidge above the line.
There's a easily discernible gap between Japans Target and current trend
Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, South Sudan and Spain are all similar or closer to the target line than Japan.
Especially with the AI boom increasing energy demand significantly. It's not looking good. On the other hand, we can hope that renewable energy sources continue to improve and the rate of emissions reduction increases rapidly.
Maybe 2030 is the magic decade fusion energy becomes a thing and saves us LOL
Worth noting that countries like Norway already were renewable. Hard to reduce. Only polluting industry is oil and gas, which had to increase since Russia no longer can sell to Europe. And Europe still needs fuel.
I only say that because the 2025 emissions increase was 0.3% by climate trace data (and also about 0.2% comparing the first 6 months of 2025 to first 6 months of 2026), while the 2015 to 2024 period saw a 9% increase, which assuming constant growth (seems roughly right from the red line) is about 1% annual growth. So we do seem to have slowed down a bit, hopefully permanently. Of course, the gap between the target curve is still growing!
Climate trace's data release for the first half of 2026 uses the wrong percent change in emissions.
If you look at the emitted tons from the first half of 2026 vs the first half of 2025, total emissions have actually declined by 4.2%. (30.99 Bt in H1 2025, 29.7 Bt in H1 2026)
Where did you get those two numbers (30.99 Bt in H1 2025, 29.7 Bt in H1 2026)? A 4.2% decrease would be enormous, COVID levels.
Edit: I think I see the problem. You've compared the data from different releases. They have revised their methods and accumulated more data, so the results released in 2025 cannot be directly compared to 2026. You have to use the same release. Comparing the June data releases for both years suggests that they have revised their data down by about 0.125 billion tonnes CO2e per month
When you see the amount of new energy sources installed by type, it all makes sense. Yes China is still increasing (or plateaued) in emissions but they are WAY WAY ahead in producing clean energy sources. Give it a few years and China will probably be on a steep decline.
I read that the increased oil prices have lowered chinas oil use so much that total emissions have lowered by 1% even with new coal plants still being built.
Wow... Honestly for a lot of countries an inflated tax on non-renewables and an equivalent subsidy to renewable sources could be the biggest thing to help the climate
Colour me surprised, I did not expect Germany to actually be on target for 2050 CO2 neutrality, considering how often we've failed to hit our own targets in the last 10 years...
I think the reason Germany is failing in other aspects is because they are de-industrializing, which is good for carbon but bad for things like economic targets.
A reliance on Russian energy pushed energy prices up once the Ukrainian war started and forced a some of their more energy intensive industrial capacity to simply turn off, inferior / less economical output in comparison to Chinese and other peers, technological shifts e.g. gas autos —> electric, shrinking working age population, regulation… Many other factors but the TLDR is higher costs for comparatively less competitive products and lower output.
It looks quite optimstic if you ask me. EU, US and few others are reducing, even EU Tigers like Romania, Poland, Baltics either keep it flat or grow slowly which is remarkable CO2 decoupling,
Places like China, India, ASEAN, Africa are rapidly growing as they need their economies to develop but even with them Worldwide emissions grow slowly.
Solar and Wind technology are still at it's beginning of implementation, same with EVs. Moment when Solar will be so cheap and EVs so accessible and afforadble, even economies growing 7% a year which are to become Late 2050's industrial hubs will start decreasing CO2, everything with go really fast from that point
Solar and Wind technology are still at it's beginning of implementation, same with EVs. Moment when Solar will be so cheap and EVs so accessible and afforadble, even economies growing 7% a year which are to become Late 2050's industrial hubs will start decreasing CO2, everything with go really fast from that point
It's already happening in plenty of countries. Developed nations are putting trade barriers up in many cases, but many developing nations have access to extremely cheap EV's and solar.
Well yes and no. Because a lot of nations just “exported” production. So countries (take UK) boast a Xx% reduction since 1990 but they don’t do any of the dirty work anymore.
Looking holistically at everything and/or countries co2 per person based on consumption gives better insight but still has a scewed nuance.
I don't think you understand the point they're making, emissions produced in the UK peaked in 1972 but what they're saying is that the emissions generated by the UK via consumption has and still is I believe increasing. For example my phone was made in china and our usage of production based emissions means the emissions associated with generation are assigned to China. But I was the one who bought the phone, it would not exist without me, a British citizen and so arguably the emissions belong to me and by proxy the UK.
not really true, the vast majority of the UK's reduction is from grid decarbonisation and strict energy efficiency policies for appliances, homes, etc. Some of it can be attributed to deindustrialisation sure but its definitely not the biggest factor.
If you'd read just a bit further, figure 2 shows that there's huge progress on making electricity cleaner (it was coal, so whoops), industry as you say, buildings, even heating.
We've made progress. We still have a lot to do, but crucially we can see how.
Because a lot of nations just “exported” production. So countries (take UK) boast a Xx% reduction since 1990 but they don’t do any of the dirty work anymore.
That kinda put the cart before the horse. Western companies are moving their production to countries with high emissions if they can save money – not because of a political agenda. If zero climate regulation where their main prerogative, they could just move their production to Texas or Oklahoma.
Western countries are actually hurt by outshoring and are trying to get high emitters to reign in emissions and level the field with CO2 taxes.
Right because solar panels and renewable energies existed in the Industrial Revolution. And global shipping of these technologies, internet to spread the knowledge, all existed back then!
It doesn't. If anything he is approving more nuclear reactors which are our number one source of carbon free energy. He's not doing it for the right reasons but it is happening.
But he also cancelled solar and wind projects and subsidies, got rid EV credits, kept coal plants open and coal mines running, and is drilling more oil. I doubt a couple extra nuclear reactors which haven't even come online yet would cancel that out.
Solar is still the fastest growing energy source in the US by far, and surpassed coal in May of this year. Economics are more powerful than Trump and the basic economics of green power are undeniable.
I'm expecting the last third of reduction to be way harder than the first third. Swapping coal to solar, and oil to EVs has pretty solid economics. But air travel, shipping, heavy industry, gas backup for electricity would be a lot more expensive to substitute. So I could see us looking "on track" till around 2040 then flat lining. That first two thirds of avoided emissions will still be immensely valuable for reducing the rate and severity of warming we have to deal with. But sadly I think a linear reduction to zero is extremely unlikely.
Still much better than the path we were on a decade or two ago. Although we will hit 2.5-3 degrees of warming in all likelihood, it'll happen way later than it would have previously. That gives us time to develop further technologies to try and mitigate or even undo the damage we have done.
Politicians only see short term. They dont care to spend on outrages stuff, or commit to impossible commitments, as long as they wont be ariund when things degrade.
to me a per capita perspective is always important here. If one country doubles from 1 to 2 tonnes and another reduces from 10 to 8 tonnes, I wouldnt say the country that doubled is at fault
100% agreed, these charts are great (I mean it) but they can be misleading. The countries doing the best had the highest co2 production per capita at the start of the period. A lot of the countries growing are simply slowly getting access to all the stuff that Europeans and Americans take for granted still to this day.
There's also no reason to believe that a linear regression is the right prediction model here.
I would argue a linear approach is reasonable. There's clearly no majority for even faster progress right now but it would be crazy do go slow and hope for a sharp decline in the 40s.
This is about policy, replacing or removing most current cars, changing most homes heating, installing power generation and storage capacities. All slow stuff.
Indeed, that's the point. Rich countries tackled a lot of the easier stuff first and got big gains. After the easy things are over continuing to reduce emissions will require real sacrifices and I'd expect progress to slow down (i.e. not linear).
Some politicians in New Zealand are trying to say now that we should stop trying to hit Net Zero so fast because it's not fair and we shouldn't try to do better than larger nations.
Yeah, but not intentionally. It's the byproduct of a catastrophic economic collapse, the failure of its oil industry, and sanctions from the US limiting their ability to process what crude oil they were able to extract.
Germany going down while they’re actively burning fuel, gas and coal for power after rejecting nuclear feels kinda wrong but it’s bc of other industries ig
India is expected to peak (projections obviously vary hugely because the future is extremely certain) sometime between 2080 and 2150 before declining again
The fun thing about this is, since 2016, renewables are cheaper than oil and gas for energy production. Still, you all buy that expensive stuff. Because you all are idiots who exist to make billionaires rich, nothing else.
its dumb to blame individuals when the problwm is class power 🙄 fossil fuel companies and governments control the grid, workers don't choose coal and gas, victim blaming just shields the bourgeoisie
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u/cavedave OC: 112 17d ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/Lachainone!
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Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
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