Dominica's Historic Contribution to Global Warming Since 1850

Key Insights

A Small Historic Footprint

Dominica's warming impact from historic emissions is around 10 megatonnes of CO2‑equivalents, amounting to approximately 0% of the global total. On a population-weighted basis this works out to about 1.7 tonnes per capita per year, which sits in the Low range of the rating scale. The impact is split almost evenly between fossil CO2 from oil and methane, with a smaller share from land-use CO2 and a modest contribution from nitrous oxide; fluorinated gases are negligible.

Patterns Across The Decades

Fossil CO2 remained very low until the late 1970s, rose through the late 1990s and early 2000s, and has been broadly stable since then. Land-use CO2 has fluctuated between small sources and sinks across the 20th century and has tended toward slight net uptake in recent years. Methane increased steadily from the mid‑20th century, rising notably from the late 1970s to around 1990 before leveling off; emissions come mainly from livestock and waste, each providing a large share. Nitrous oxide grew through the 1970s and 1980s, then eased slightly after 1990, with agriculture as the dominant source. Fluorinated gases remain near zero throughout the record.

Opportunities For Low-Carbon Growth

With a low per capita impact and a negligible global share, Dominica has limited historic responsibility. The most effective steps now focus on the largest sources: curbing oil-related CO2 by improving efficiency and shifting toward cleaner energy, and reducing methane through better livestock and waste management. Maintaining and enhancing land sinks can help keep land-use CO2 near or below zero, reinforcing a sustainable development pathway.

Background

Historic Per Capita Emissions

Historic per capita emissions are a crucial long-period (since 1850), population-weighted (accounting for changing population size) indicator. It shows the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions of a nation per capita per year to the current warming.

The rating scale is:

Extremely High: above 10 tonnes per capita per year
Very High: above 7.5 tonnes
High: above 5 tonnes
Moderate: above 2.5 tonnes
Low: above 0 tonnes
Negative Emissions: under 0

Historically, we don't expect any nation to reach negative emissions. Current warming, or warming targets, like 1.5 °C and 1.7 °C are all based on the fact that there have been human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and there will be some more. It is clear, however, that some nations have had incredibly high historic contributions per capita.

Total Historic Impact

This is the total amount of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and F-Gases emissions of a nation from 1850 till 2023 (last available year in the data) expressed in megatonnes of CO₂-equivalents. The gases have different atmospheric lifetimes (decay) and warming effects, for this reason we use the GWP100 (100 year time horizon method) to calculate the global warming potential of N₂O and F-Gases to express in CO₂-equivalents. For CH₄, which is a short-term gas, we use the GWP* method to express the historic impact in CO₂-equivalents.

Wikipedia: Global Warming Potential

Total Historic Share

This is a nation's total historic share of global emissions and its contribution to global warming. It is an indicator of historic responsibility. All nations share the responsibility to ensure that developing nations do not copy and repeat the behavior of nations with high historic greenhouse gas emissions, they should not buy into old unsustainable fossil-fuels-based technology, land-use, and infrastructure, rather foster a sustainable and cleaner development.

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About the Data

The last available year in all the emission datasets is 2023. CO₂ emissions data is from the Global Carbon Project. It contains national CO₂ emissions from fossil sources and land-use change. Emissions from CH₄, N₂O and F-gases come from the PRIMAP-Hist dataset. It is a rich dataset that combines several published sources to create a historical emissions time series for various greenhouse gases. Population data are also from Global Carbon Project where available, however, for many nations it doesn't have historic population going back to 1850. Those historic gaps are filled with population data from Our World in Data.

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.

PRIMAP-hist The PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series (1750-2023)
Update cycle: Every few monthsDelay: Less than 1 yearCredits: Gütschow, Johannes; Busch, Daniel; Pflüger, Mika (2024): The PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series (1750-2023) v2.6. Zenodo.

Our World in Data Population - Our World in Data
Update cycle: YearlyDelay: 7 monthsCredits: HYDE (2023); Gapminder (2022); UN WPP (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data