Total emissions from burning fossil fuels in developing countries, including China, India and Brazil, have more than doubled since 1990 and are continuing to rise rapidly. By contrast total emissions from developed countries, such as the US, Japan and Britain have hardly changed over the same period.
Last year developed countries were responsible for 46 per cent of global emissions, with developing countries responsible for 54 per cent.
The figures, published by an international team of scientists, will put pressure on developing countries to set stricter targets for slowing the increase in emissions. China and India are refusing to agree to any cap on their emissions and are instead offering vague targets for cutting emissions per unit of GDP. China overtook the US in 2006 as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and has extended its lead each year since then.The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, compared the total emissions of 38 developed countries with those of all other countries.
The authors, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia, concluded: “Since 1990 the growth in fossil fuel CO2 has been dominated by countries that do not have emissions limitations. Among [developed] countries growth in some has been offset by declines in others.”
The study said that the increase in emissions from developing countries was in part due to their manufacture of goods for export to rich countries.
Professor Le Quéré said that emissions per person remained much higher in rich countries, which supported only about a billion of the world’s population of 6.7 billion. However, explosive growth in emissions in some countries, especially China, meant that the gap was slowly closing.
China emitted 4.8 tonnes of CO2 per person in 2007, a rise of 138 per cent since 1991. India emitted 1.2 tonnes, up 79 per cent, and Brazil 2.1 tonnes, up 30 per cent.
The UK’s emissions fell 12 per cent over the same period to 9.3 tonnes per person and US per capita emissions fell by 1 per cent to 19.9 tonnes.
Professor Le Quéré said that the study did not take account of historic responsibility for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. She said that developing countries were responsible for only 20 per cent of cumulative emissions since 1751. “Emissions in rich countries have only stabilised because they have reached a certain stage of development which other countries have yet to attain.”
The study also found that the growth in global emissions from fossil fuels had accelerated from 1 per cent a year in the 1990s to an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent between 2000 and 2008. The growth continued last year during the global economic downturn, though at a reduced rate of 2 per cent.
Coal has overtaken oil as the biggest source of emissions, largely because many developing countries, including China, have vast domestic reserves of coal but have to import oil.
The study also suggested that the rise in CO2 emissions was outstripping the Earth’s ability to soak up the carbon in forests and oceans. It said the levels of global emissions that remained in the atmosphere had grown from 40 to 45 per cent over the past 50 years. This finding was disputed in a separate report, published last week, by another scientist who studied the same data. Both studies involved scientists from the University of Bristol’s climate change research programme. Wolfgang Knorr, writing in Geophysical Research Letters, found no increase in the proportion of emitted carbon remaining in the atmosphere, suggesting that forests and oceans were more effective than previously thought at soaking up man-made emissions.
The dispute between climate scientists at the same university will be seized upon by climate change sceptics, who argue that the scientific evidence for man-made global warming remains uncertain and open to differing interpretations.
Meanwhile, President Obama tried to restore confidence in international negotiations on climate change by saying that he wanted the UN summit in Copenhagen next month to agree an “accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations, and one that has immediate operational effect”. He was speaking in Beijing two days after his officials had ruled out signing a legally binding treaty in Copenhagen.
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
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