My thanks to Robin Guenier for bringing to my attention the recently updated Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR). This provides us with up to date data regarding greenhouse gas emissions to 2025. It offers a stark counterpoint to those campaigning organisations that seek to tell us that overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions are just around the corner; that we need to make one more push and we’ll be over the hill and on the way to the overall emissions reductions that they say are necessary if we are to meet the targets set out in the Paris Climate Agreement. The corrective to that viewpoint can be found in the opening paragraph of the summary of main findings in the database:

China, the United States, India, the EU27, Russia and Indonesia were the world’s largest GHG emitters in 2025. Together they account for 50.1% of global population, 62.3% of global gross domestic product, 63% of global fossil fuel consumption and 62% of global GHG emissions. Among these top emitters, in 2025, the United States recorded the largest absolute increase between 2024 and 2025 (+131.5 Mt CO2eq, or +2.2%), followed by Indonesia (+16.1 Mt CO2eq, or +1.2%). China’s emissions remained broadly stable, increasing by only 9.6 Mt CO2eq (+0.1%), while India, the EU27 and Russia recorded small decreases. With only two exceptions, 2009 (global financial crisis) and 2020 (COVID-19), global GHG emissions have grown steadily since the beginning of the 21st century, mainly due to the increase in fossil CO2 emissions by China, India, and other emerging economies. Based on the emission estimates for 2025 provided by EDGAR, global GHG emissions increased by 0.7% compared to 2024, reaching 54.1 Gt CO2eq.

The EU 27 (generating 5.78% of global GHGs), reduced year on year emissions by just 0.24% (and some EU countries – Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain – actually increased their year-on-year emissions). The UK’s reduction was just under 1%, but this seems to be achieved in significant part by exporting emissions (consumption emissions aren’t declining in the UK at anything like that rate, as Jit has explained here).

GHG Emissions Reductions – Major Emitters

Among major emitters, other than the UK and the EU (or more precisely, some EU countries) very few countries saw reductions in GHG emissions between 2024 and 2025. Australia’s reduction was 1.2%. Brazil’s was 0.865%. India’s was just 0.15% (and its increased reliance on coal might suggest that even this modest reduction will now be going into reverse). Japan’s reduction was 1.44%. However, Japan’s population is falling, and its per capita GHG emissions fell by the smaller proportion of 1.04%. Russia’s reduction (does this take into account the emissions arising from its war on Ukraine?) was just 0.13%. Russia’s population is also falling, and its per capita emissions actually increased by 0.055%.

GHG Emissions Increases – Major Emitters

No other major emitter of GHGs (by which I mean emitters of 1% or more of the global total) reduced them at all in 2025. In fact Canada (responsible for 1.41% of global emissions) increased their emissions by almost 2%.

China (responsible for 29.51%) increased emissions by 0.06%.

Indonesia (responsible for 2.51%) increased its emissions by almost 1.2%.

International aviation (responsible for 1.17%) increased its emissions by more than 5%.

International shipping (responsible for 1.39%) increased its emissions by almost 2%.

Iran (responsible for 2.07%) increased its emissions by 1.71%.

Mexico (responsible for 1.32%) increased its emissions by 0.78%.

Saudi Arabia (responsible for 1.56%) increased its emissions by 1.27%.

South Korea (responsible for 1.29%) increased its emissions by 0.46%.

Turkiye (responsible for 1.13%) increased its emissions by 4.15%.

USA (responsible for 11.11%) increased its emissions by 2.23%.

Vietnam (responsible for 1.01%) increased its emissions by 2.75%.

These numbers matter. There are many ways of examining the data, but the overwhelming impression that is created is that for all the money spent on emissions reductions, for all the COPs, for all the effort being put into Net Zero by the UK (leading the world, remember), the project still isn’t going as planned.

Smaller, but not insignificant emitters

One of the things we are told repeatedly by those who insist that the UK must maintain its Net Zero targets, is that the many countries with emissions below 1% of the global total individually, can collectively make a significant difference. Ergo, we in the UK must keep at it, because unless we do so, the other smaller players will lose heart, and together we can go a long way towards undermining the GHG increases that are taking place elsewhere. Let’s take a look, then, at countries with emissions in 2025 representing between 0.2% and 1% of emissions (ignoring the UK and individual EU member countries already mentioned above):

Increases

Pakistan (responsible for 0.98%) increased its emissions by 2.4%.

Iraq (responsible for 0.79%) increased its emissions by 2.71%.

Egypt (responsible for 0.72%) increased its emissions by 2.24%.

Nigeria (responsible for 0.68%) increased its emissions by 4.8%.

Malaysia (responsible for 0.62%) increased its emissions by 2.11%.

Kazakhstan (responsible for 0.66%) increased its emissions by 5.02%.

United Arab Emirates (responsible for 0.52%) increased its emissions by 3.83%.

Algeria (responsible for 0.5%) increased its emissions by 2.15%.

Bangladesh (responsible for 0.45%) increased its emissions by 5.97%.

Uzbekistan (responsible for 0.4%) increased its emissions by 1.85%.

Ethiopia (responsible for 0.35%) increased its emissions by 2.22%.

Kuwait (responsible for 0.33%) increased its emissions by 2.04%.

Venezuela (responsible for 0.33%) increased its emissions by 1.52%.

Qatar (responsible for 0.31%) increased its emissions by 1.08%.

Oman (responsible for 0.26%) increased its emissions by 4.09%.

Myanmar/Burma (responsible for 0.25%) increased its emissions by 1.58%.

Sudan and South Sudan (responsible for 0.24%) increased their emissions by 0.58%.

Turkmenistan (responsible for 0.23%) increased its emissions by 7.05%.

Libya (responsible for 0.22%) increased its emissions by 9.22%.

Chile (responsible for 0.21%) increased its emissions by 3.24%.

Morocco (responsible for 0.21%) increased its emissions by 3.28%.

Kenya (responsible for 0.2%) increased its emissions by 2.48%.

Reductions

South Africa (responsible for 0.96%) reduced its emissions by 1.89%.

Thailand (responsible for 0.74%) reduced its emissions by 1.17%.

Argentina (responsible for 0.65%) reduced its emissions by 0.05%.

Taiwan (responsible for 0.56%) reduced its emissions by 0.73%.

Phillipines (responsible for 0.5%) reduced its emissions by 2.38%.

Ukraine (responsible for 0.39%) reduced its emissions by 1.04%. I wonder if this takes into account the emissions associated with defending itself against Russia’s war of aggression?

Colombia (responsible for 0.38%) reduced its emissions by 4.83%.

Mongolia (responsible for 0.2%) reduced its emissions by 0.67%.

Threshold

In case people suspect me of cherry-picking the threshold at which I consider the emissions of individual countries to be sufficiently significant to merit inclusion, I would point out that Chad (responsible for 0.19% of global GHG emissions in 2025) also increased its year on year emissions by 3.97%; Peru (responsible for 0.19%) increased its emissions by 0.57%; and Tanzania (responsible for 0.19%) increased its emissions by 3.17%; while North Korea (responsible for 0.17% reduced its emissions by 0.71%, but it’s not really a country we should seek to emulate.

Is the UK leading the mid-level emitters?

What have we learned about the trends among the smaller but not insignificant emitters? First of all, that eight (or nine, if we include North Korea) reduced their emissions between 2024 and 2025. However, 22 countries at this level (or 25, if we include the countries at 0.19%) increased their emissions. Broadly those increasing emissions at this level outnumber those reducing emissions by 3:1.

But there’s more. Of those reducing emissions, only two did so by more than 2%. Of those increasing their emissions, 17 did so by more than 2% (in four cases by more than 5%) while only five did so by less than 2%. Of the three countries each emitting 0.19% of the global total, two increased their emissions by more than 3%.

Conclusion

The UK’s attempt to lead the way, whether globally, or among the small-mid level emitters, is failing abysmally. Hope and fine words are all very well, but there is no arguing with facts.

13 Comments

  2. Thank you, Robin. A combination of you bringing the up-to-date data to my attention, and your encouragement of Clisceppers to comment on an article at The Conversation, led to the production of this analysis. In many ways, it grew out of the comment I posted there. 🙂

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  3. Meanwhile, the Guardian (in the form of George Monbiot on this occasion) still cherry picks data while ignoring the really significant data:

    “Is Burnham trying to appease Trump? Or Reform? What other reason is there for these North Sea oil plans?

    Climate catastrophe is on our doorstep – yet Labour’s impending approval of further drilling will bring more pain for negligible gains”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/andy-burnham-north-sea-oil-plans-labour-climate-drilling-trump-reform

    …While the small amount of fossil fuel these two fields will produce allows politicians to argue that their climate impacts can be ignored, the diplomatic implications are considerable. The only chance of preventing climate catastrophe is international agreement based on mutual trust. To its credit, the UK – while falling short of what many of us would like to see – has been a leader in these efforts. But when our government refuses to leave fossil fuels in the ground, its credibility diminishes – leaving its negotiating position weakened….

    Have you looked at the updated EDGAR data, George?

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  4. These are facts. The people dismantling British industry and energy security, wrecking the economy, desecrating the environment and destroying prime farmland, don’t trade on facts; they trade entirely on propaganda, emotion and soundbites – and pseudoscience aka bad weather superstition. When you confront them with the facts, they just dismiss them (and you, the messenger, as a ‘climate delayer’ or ‘denier’) and carry on regardless. And they get away with it. Because establishment institutions and the establishment media do not hold them to account for their fantasies, their lies, and their deceptions. This is the problem. The stubborn Climate Idiocracy has become essentially ingrained, unremovable, irreversible. It will now run its course until harsh reality in the form of catastrophe intervenes – unless by some miracle we get a government in the next few years which repeals the Climate Change Act immediately in its entirety and dishonours the contractual agreements made under the fraudulent renewables subsidies industry.

    Liked by 4 people

  5. Contrary to the narrative of the UN IPCC and the rest of the climate establishment, man-made CO2 emissions have no perceptible impact on the level of atmospheric CO2.

    Here is a graph of global CO2 emissions over time: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

    Note the dips during the global economic downturn of the 2021-2 global Covid lockdowns and the global recessions of 1982, 1991 and 2008-9.

    Here is the graph of Mauna Loa level of atmospheric CO2: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

    Note the lack of any dips or sudden trajectory changes, discounting the natural annual variations.

    The IPCC and its affiliates have put out arcane arguments to the effect that man-made CO2 emissions are the main if not the direct cause of rising atmospheric CO2. I’ve never been able to understand these arguments and the above lack of correlation between global economic activity and CO2 levels would appear to justify my scepticism.

    My layman-level scepticism is backed up by science. Here is a presentation by CO2 Coalition’s Johnathan Cohler presenting a set of physics papers which he says totally invalidate the climate science purveyed by the IPCC. His most striking conclusion is that the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 that we have witnessed over the past century is not due to anthropogenic consumption of hydrocarbons as the IPCC would have us believe but is almost entirely natural: https://x.com/cohler/status/2081407310493081791?s=20.

    And of course rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are very beneficial to plant and crop growth.

    The UK’s share of global CO2 emissions is around 0.8% and these emissions are beneficial, not harmful. It is the height of madness to pursue the economy-wrecking policy of striving (with hopeless lack of success) to eliminate {to Net Zero) our globally-insignificant man-made CO2 emissions while the majority rest of the world carries on steadily increasing its consumption of hydrocarbons.

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  6. Here’s another version of the Mauna Loa graph, annotated with COP summits. Isn’t it odd that the penny never drops with these people! Talk about Einstein’s definition of insanity.

    On the other hand, I’m sure the leaders all know its’s a hoax aimed at achieving one-world governance (“the science is settled”, such an unscientific mantra) and these COPs are just a show to try to fool the gullible.

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  7. In the Climate Idiocracy, the idiots in charge build machines to suck CO2 (natural plant fertiliser) out of the air at a cost of millions of pounds per tonne. In the Climate Idiocracy, the idiots shut down the factories making artificial fertiliser, risking global famine, in order to ‘save the planet’. No doubt they will soon start watering the crops with Brawndo instead.

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  8. dougbrodie – the annual emissions of CO2 represent about 1% of the atmospheric stock. The decrease in emissions over the covid pandemic was about 5% of that 1%. Exactly what change in the atmospheric concentration did you expect to see?

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  9. Jit, to turn your point around, why does the steady year-on-year increase in man-made CO2 emissions not cause any change in the slope of the Mauna Loa graph? It would be helpful to know if you can rebut the Cohler analysis.

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  10. The first difference (i.e. the slope) of the Mauna Loa graph gives an obvious rising trend, showing that the rate of rise of CO2 is increasing (with a small exponent).

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  11. Good posts by Jit. Interesting that the Covid dip comes in 2022, maybe because it takes a year or so for a reduction in global CO2 emissions to show at Mauna Loa in the mid-Pacific.

    There’s more to this issue than I thought. It’s clear to me that the climate establishment has been blatantly lying to us for 30 and more years, e.g. ignoring the science that the global warming impact of atmospheric CO2 is subject to logarithmic saturation, and the science of atmospheric CO2 residency is particularly arcane and difficult to penetrate. Who is right, Cohler or the propagandists? Needs further cogitation!

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  12. Mark covers at lot of useful data, but misses out the most crucial one. Global GHG emissions were 54.1 GtCO2e, 0.7% higher than in 2024.

    The advantage of the EDGAR data is that it provides detailed estimates by country. But there are two disadvantages.

    First, it does not include land use changes. These are difficult to measure.

    Second, there is not a long-term record.

    The annual UNEP Emissions Gap Report, does both of these. Published in November, just before COP, the 2025 edition estimated 2024 emissions at 57.7 GtCO2e.

    The key figure is the Emissions Gap Chart. Since at least the 2014 edition (updated for IPCC AR5) this chart has projected emissions increasing during the 2020s, but the 2C emissions pathway requiring a major emissions cut.

    Compare the 2016 chart (when the 1.5C pathway first made an appearance) with the 2025 chart.

    There are flaws in the graphs. For instance, they understate the size of the gaps between the current trajectories and desired policy pathways. But what is clear is that the UN has been pushing drastic global emissions cuts for years. Yet UNEP provides charts demonstrating that such targets were never going to be achieved.

    Apologies for going off-topic. It is just that UK net zero, incompetently implemented, and with a 43% emissions cut this decade, was never part of a global policy to “combat climate change”.

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  13. “India is producing more green energy – but wasting a lot of it”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xkvzlz0x4o

    On a hot July afternoon this year, electricity generated from renewable energy briefly met over half of India’s peak power demand – only the second time this happened. The first instance was around the same period a year ago.

    While it was only briefly that power generated from solar, wind, hydro and nuclear sources collectively outstripped coal-based output, it was a milestone moment reflecting the astonishing growth of non-fossil fuels to the country’s electricity mix over the last decade…..

    It’s interesting that for the purposes of the article the BBC chose to lable nuclear energy as renewable energy. Many “greens” would disagree with them, but so labelling it was the only way the BBC could make the claim that for a brief moment renewables generated more electricity than fossil fuels did in India. Perhaps more significant is this:

    …To be sure, coal-based power plants still continue to generate 70% of India’s electricity on average because they run on a higher load factor, or for more hours than solar or wind. …

    The thrust of the article is about problems with renewables:

    …Yet, the gains [in renewable energy] are tempered by some serious challenges.

    Foremost among them is a shortage of grid capacity. The renewables’ build out has significantly outpaced transmission infrastructure, a point of major concern for policymakers.

    “In the first quarter of 2026, transmission constraints accounted for nearly two-thirds of all renewable energy curtailment at 300 gigawatt-hours (GWh),” according to Ember, a global energy think-tank.

    Put simply, that means a bulk of the clean energy that was produced in India was wasted because the country’s transmission lines have been dogged by missed targets, with one out of four inter-state projects facing delays of over a year.

    The difficulty lies in matching the speed of generation projects with the grid build-out, says Sinha….

    Sound familiar?

    …A quick solution to addressing this gap would have been to build battery storage systems at renewable pooling stations to integrate the power into the grid.

    “Had that been the case, India could have stored the energy and used it during evening hours rather than wasting it,” says Garg.

    But storage capacity has not grown because of a huge jump in the price of batteries, raw material shortages due to the war in the Middle East and a fall in the value of the Indian currency which has jacked up financing costs for Indian companies.

    “Many storage projects that were meant to come up fell through as a result,” Garg adds….

    Perhaps most significantly of all:

    …India is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases and facing a sharp rise in electricity demand, which has grown at a compounded rate of over 7% every year. It is expected to further accelerate with the expansion of industries like data centres and chip manufacturing.

    The International Energy Agency, external predicts India’s electricity demand will increase by 80% by 2035, the sharpest jump among emerging economies….

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