Barbados' Sources of CO2 Emissions
Key Insights
Oil Dominates The Story
Barbados' emissions were negligible until the post-war era, then oil use steadily expanded from the early 1960s through the mid-2000s. Emissions from oil climbed for decades and peaked in the late 2000s at roughly 1.5 megatonnes, before easing back. Oil accounts for nearly nine-tenths of the country's CO2 and has contributed nearly 60 megatonnes cumulatively, so its trajectory defines the national picture. Since the late 2000s, the trend has been a gradual decline, with recent years hovering around the low 1‑megatonne range.
Other Sources Are Modest
Emissions from other fossil processes emerged in the late 1970s, rose into the early 2000s, and have since leveled off around a tenth of a megatonne. Gas has remained a small, fairly stable contributor since the mid‑1990s, while coal is essentially absent. Land‑use change historically added only a small share, and in the past decade it has acted as a slight net sink, offsetting a bit of fossil emissions.
Momentum And Next Steps
Today's profile shows oil slowly declining and other fossil sources broadly stable to edging down. That's progress, but the pace is modest relative to the dominance of oil. Further cuts hinge on sustaining the downturn in oil use across energy and transport and tightening efficiency and process improvements that curb other fossil emissions. Maintaining land stewardship that preserves the recent sink can provide a small but helpful counterbalance.
Background
The chart shows a national breakdown by source of the yearly CO2 emissions from human activities and processes expressed in megatonnes. It is critical to know and track the sources of national CO2 emissions in order to understand their individual impacts on climate change.
The sources of human CO2 emissions are
- CO2 From Fossil Fuels and Industry: coal, oil, gas combustion, other fossil processes
- CO2 From Land-Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry
Coal, oil and gas combustion
Fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the combustion of coal, oil and gas are emitted by processes in electricity generation, transport, industry, and the building sector. All processes can be linked to human activities. Examples include driving cars with combustion engines burning diesel or gas, or electric cars charged by electricity from a power plant that burns coal.
Other fossil processes
Fossil CO2 emissions from other processes include sources like cement manufacturing and production of chemicals and fertilizers. Cement also has an absorption factor highlighted in the absorption breakdown chart.
Land-use change
Human civilization emits CO2 by changing and managing its land. Those emissions come, for example, from deforestation, logging, forest degradation, harvest activities and shifting agriculture cultivation. Land-use change also absorbs considerable amounts of CO2, which is shown in the absorption breakdown chart. Land-use change emits more than it absorbs, so the net effect is still emissions, but less than for coal, oil and gas.
Wikipedia: Greenhouse Gas EmissionsEarth System Science Data: GCP 2020 paper: Section 2.2 Land-use change; Section 2.1 Fossil fuel emissions
IPCC: Annual Report 6, 5.2.1.1 Anthropogenic CO2 emissions
Units and Measures
CO2 emissions are expressed in the total weight in megatonnes per year. 1 Megatonne is equal to 1 million tonnes.
Wikipedia: MegatonneWikipedia: Global warming potential
About the Data
The last available year is 2023. CO2 emissions data is from the Global Carbon Project. It contains national CO2 emissions from fossil sources and land-use change.
The Key Insights paragraph was created using a large language model (LLM) in combination with our data, historic events, and a structured approach for best accuracy by separating the context generation from the interpretation and narrative.
Data Sources
Global Carbon Budget 2024 Global Carbon Budget
Update cycle: yearlyDelay: ~ 10 months after the end of the year. Current year values are estimated and published in November.Credits: Friedlingstein et al., 2024, ESSD. Friedlingstein, P., O'Sullivan, M., Jones, M. W., Andrew, R. M., Hauck, J., Landschützer, P., Le Quéré, C., Li, H., Luijkx, I. T., Olsen, A., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Alin, S. R., Arneth, A., Arora, V., Bates, N. R., Becker, M., Bellouin, N., Berghoff, C. F., Bittig, H. C., Bopp, L., Cadule, P., Campbell, K., Chamberlain, M. A., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Colligan, T., Decayeux, J., Djeutchouang, L., Dou, X., Duran Rojas, C., Enyo, K., Evans, W., Fay, A., Feely, R. A., Ford, D. J., Foster, A., Gasser, T., Gehlen, M., Gkritzalis, T., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Gürses, Ö., Harris, I., Hefner, M., Heinke, J., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Jacobson, A. R., Jain, A., Jarníková, T., Jersild, A., Jiang, F., Jin, Z., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Korsbakken, J. I., Lauvset, S. K., Lefèvre, N., Liu, Z., Liu, J., Ma, L., Maksyutov, S., Marland, G., Mayot, N., McGuire, P., Metzl, N., Monacci, N. M., Morgan, E. J., Nakaoka, S.-I., Neill, C., Niwa, Y., Nützel, T., Olivier, L., Ono, T., Palmer, P. I., Pierrot, D., Qin, Z., Resplandy, L., Roobaert, A., Rosan, T. M., Rödenbeck, C., Schwinger, J., Smallman, T. L., Smith, S., Sospedra-Alfonso, R., Steinhoff, T., Sun, Q., Sutton, A. J., Séférian, R., Takao, S., Tatebe, H., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Torres, O., Tourigny, E., Tsujino, H., Tubiello, F., van der Werf, G., Wanninkhof, R., Wang, X., Yang, D., Yang, X., Yu, Z., Yuan, W., Yue, X., Zaehle, S., Zeng, N., and Zeng, J.: Global Carbon Budget 2024, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-519, in review, 2024.