A Comparative Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Developed and Developing Countries Since 1850

This paper aims to inform discussions on historical responsibility for climate change by presenting a comparative analysis of historical emissions from numerous datasets, using different measures of emissions, different classifications of developed and developing countries, and covering different time periods. We find that while the various datasets give significantly different estimates of total emissions, they are reasonably consistent in their estimates of developed country shares; that developed countries using the UNFCCC’s Annex I classification are responsible for about half of all GHG emissions since 1850, and less than 40 percent if limited to the 23 Annex II countries with a formal obligation to provide climate finance. These shares are lower if we consider contributions to global warming rather than GHG emissions, much lower if we only consider emissions since 1990, but higher if we restrict analysis to just CO2. We also find that taking account of colonial or consumption emissions makes relatively little difference to our results, and that developed country shares of cumulative per capita emissions (not that we think this is an appropriate measure) are even lower than for cumulative emissions.