Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Country and Sector

Background

As many I am a fan of Our World in Data work. One visualization I found particularly interesting was the one from Hannah Ritchie on mapping global GHG emissions by sector and sub-sector.

What I found striking is the size of energy (~73% of GHG emissions) and the ability to quickly compare across countries. For instance Iron and Steel production (~7%) is 3.7x greater than aviation emissions (~1.9%)!

But what does it look like at the country level? I have asked Hannah on Twitter and unfortunately the data is not easily available.

Data

One pointer from laydgeur was to use the Greenhouse gas inventory data by party from the United Nations Climate Change secretariat.

Using the Flexible query interface, it is possible to download a hierarchy sector GHG emissions by country for the last year reported (here 2018). Not all countries have the same level of data but it's a great start. That csv is available in the data/emissions.csv folder.

Here is a sample of the output. As you can see the subsectors are indicated with a level (1, 1.A, 1.A.1 etc..) which will come handy for our visualization.

Country	Category	emissions
Australia	1. Energy	435570.94
Australia	1.AA Fuel Combustion - Sectoral approach	381121.1
Australia	1.A.1 Energy Industries	213835.41
Australia	1.A.1.a Public Electricity and Heat Production	183170.46
Australia	1.A.1.b Petroleum Refining	3078.61
Australia	1.A.1.c Manufacture of Solid Fuels and Other Energy Industries	27586.35

Not all categories match unfortunately. For instance the category Public Electricity and Heat Production would be allocated to "energy used in buildings" in Hannah's graph.

Methodology

• Country emissions do not include the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) values which can have negative values (as a forest can trap GHG emissions). That total value at the country level is available from the UN site as GHG total without LULUCF, in kt CO₂ equivalent
• Sector definitions are available on the United Nations interface - https://di.unfccc.int/flex_annex1
• Numbers are reported in Tons of CO₂ equivalent.
• I have simplified the categorization of emissions using the data/mapping.csv table.

Usage

• Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Run in terminal:

python data_cleaning.py