30 September 2026 – In 2025, the world added 380 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with the United States adding 131 million tonnes. That means that 4% of the world’s population, in a country that already emits 17.5 tonnes per person, contributed with more than a third of the global increase. China stayed flat. India stayed flat. Most of Europe went down. The story of 2025 is not that the world failed to act; it is that one country, already emitting 17.5 tonnes per person, drove almost all of the increase.
The AQAL Foundation, which I founded with Thomas Schulz with the explicit intent to advance the goals of the Club of Rome, turns the yearly European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) data into a single chart. This year’s edition, with the full analysis, is here. However, the numbers only start to speak when you can see them side by side.
One picture, four dimensions
The chart is a variwide chart. Each country or region is a rectangle. Its height shows emissions per person, its width shows population and its colour shows whether emissions rose (red) or fell (blue) compared to the previous year. The area of the rectangle is that region’s total. Sorted from highest to lowest per person, it answers immediately who emits most, how far apart we are and who is moving in which direction.
Credit: Thomas Schulz and Mariana Bozesan, AQAL Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data: European Commission JRC/EDGAR 2026 report.
What the 2025 chart shows
- Global emissions reached 54.1 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent, up 0.71%.
- The average person emits 6.62 tonnes. The median person emits 4.51. The gap between the highest per-capita emitter, Qatar at 54.8 tonnes and the lowest, the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 0.545, has crossed 100 to 1.
- On the 38 groups of the chart, 20 reduced their per-capita emissions. Those 20 hold 57.6% of humanity. More than half the world now lives where the per-person number is falling.
- International aviation rose 5.05% and shipping 1.96%. Neither appears in any national account and neither is falling.
Where is the trap?
The global per-person emissions went down. They went down because the world population grew faster than the emissions. The per-person emissions have fallen in 27 of the last 55 years, while the total emissions climbed almost without interruption. But the atmosphere doesn’t know country lines and responds to the total emissions. And the total went up!
The neighbours who prove what is possible
Germany emits 8.01 tonnes per person. France emits 5.65 per person. Two neighbouring economies, comparable living standards, similar climates, both among the 10 largest in the world, and one emits 42% more per person than the other. The difference sits almost entirely in the power sector. France produces about two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power. Germany closed its last three reactors in April 2023. In the transport and industry sectors, the two countries look much alike.
One structural decision about how to make electricity is worth a 42% difference in what each citizen emits, on a timescale a government can act within.
As a committed impact investor, I must admit that after four decades of well-meaning impact investing, fair-finance initiatives, corporate social responsibility, Paris Agreement signatures and UN Sustainable Development Goal pledges, the gap between commitment and outcome has become impossible to ignore. The data show that a single structural decision, like the one Germany and France made differently on nuclear power, can matter more than another year of commitments.
What the data do not say
One year is not a trend. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission revised its 2024 estimate upwards by 563 million tonnes and next year’s revision could move a 0.71% increase. What is harder to revise away is the shape of the year: the growth concentrated in one wealthy country while China and India held still. If that shape holds, the work of bending the global curve has moved to a country with the capital, the engineers and the factory space to do it. France has already shown what one such decision is worth.
*The chart is published under a Creative Commons licence. Please take it, share it and use it in your own work. You can find it, with the PDF, at aqalgroup.com
