Cameroon's Sources of CO2 Emissions
Key Insights
2024 CO2 Emissions Profile
Cameroon's 2024 CO2 emissions totalled around 36.9 megatonnes CO2e. Land-use dominated, contributing about 27.3 megatonnes CO2, or 73.9% of national emissions, and declined by roughly 0.9 megatonnes CO2 per year over the ten years to 2024. Oil contributed around 5.6 megatonnes CO2 (15.2%) and fell modestly. Other Fossil contributed about 2.9 megatonnes CO2 (7.9%) and gas 1.1 megatonnes CO2 (3.0%), both rising slightly; coal was effectively absent.
Historic Coal Emissions
Coal emissions were very small throughout Cameroon's history. They reached a modest peak of roughly 0.06 megatonnes CO2 in 1952, then fell to near zero by the mid-1950s. Emissions remained around 0.004 megatonnes CO2 through 1997.
Historic Oil Emissions
Oil emissions rose gradually from around 0.1 megatonnes CO2 in 1950 to about 1.8 in 1978, then climbed sharply to above 6 in the early 1980s. They fluctuated thereafter, peaking at roughly 7.3 megatonnes CO2 in 1989, before recovering from the early 1990s to around 5.6 megatonnes CO2 in 2024.
Historic Gas Emissions
Gas emissions were negligible until the mid-2000s, then rose to around 0.7 megatonnes CO2 in 2007. After a brief decline, they increased to a peak of roughly 1.7 megatonnes CO2 in 2020, then fell back to around 1.1 megatonnes CO2 in 2024.
Historic Land-use Emissions
Land-use emissions varied substantially across the record. They fell from about 11 megatonnes CO2 in the 1880s to net removals of roughly 5 megatonnes CO2 by 1913, before rising sharply to over 60 by the late 1950s. Emissions later declined, but surged to a peak of around 78 megatonnes CO2 in 2009, ending at about 27.3 megatonnes CO2 in 2024.
Historic Other Fossil Emissions
Other Fossil emissions were close to zero until the early 1990s, when they jumped from around 0.3 to 2.2 megatonnes CO2 in 1994. They then varied around 2-3 megatonnes CO2, reaching a peak of roughly 3.2 in 2022 and ending at around 2.9 megatonnes CO2 in 2024.
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
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National CO2 emissions data through 2024 is from the Global Carbon Project and covers 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 2025 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, P., O'Sullivan, M., Jones, M. W., Andrew, R. M., Bakker, D. C. E., Hauck, J., Landschützer, P., Le Quéré, C., Li, H., Luijkx, I. T., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Aas, K., Alin, S. R., Anthoni, P., Barbero, L., Bates, N. R., Bellouin, N., Benoit-Cattin, A., Berghoff, C. F., Bernardello, R., Bopp, L., Brasika, I. B. M., Chamberlain, M. A., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Collier, N. O., Colligan, T. H., Cronin, M., Djeutchouang, L., Dou, X., Enright, M. P., Enyo, K., Erb, M., Evans, W., Feely, R. A., Feng, L., Ford, D. J., Foster, A., Fransner, F., Gasser, T., Gehlen, M., Gkritzalis, T., Goncalves De Souza, J., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Guenet, B., Gürses, Ö., Harrington, K., Harris, I., Heinke, J., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Ito, A., Jacobson, A. R., Jain, A. K., Jarníková, T., Jersild, A., Jiang, F., Jones, S. D., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Kong, Y., Korsbakken, J. I., Koven, C., Kunimitsu, T., Lan, X., Liu, J., Liu, Z., Liu, Z., Lo Monaco, C., Ma, L., Marland, G., McGuire, P. C., McKinley, G. A., Melton, J., Monacci, N., Monier, E., Morgan, E. J., Munro, D. R., Müller, J. D., Nakaoka, S.-I., Nayagam, L. R., Niwa, Y., Nutzel, T., Olsen, A., Omar, A. M., Pan, N., Pandey, S., Pierrot, D., Qin, Z., Regnier, P. A. G., Rehder, G., Resplandy, L., Roobaert, A., Rosan, T. M., Rödenbeck, C., Schwinger, J., Skjelvan, I., Smallman, T. L., Spada, V., Sreeush, M. G., Sun, Q., Sutton, A. J., Sweeney, C., Swingedouw, D., Séférian, R., Takao, S., Tatebe, H., Tian, H., Tian, X., Tilbrook, B., Tsujino, H., Tubiello, F., van Ooijen, E., van der Werf, G., van de Velde, S. J., Walker, A., Wanninkhof, R., Yang, X., Yuan, W., Yue, X., and Zeng, J.: Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2025-659, in review, 2025.