Gambia's Historic Contribution to Global Warming Since 1850
Key Insights
Small Share, Low Per Capita
Since the 1850s, Gambia's historic emissions have added around 200 megatonnes to global warming-well under 0.1% of the world's total. On a population-weighted basis this is roughly 2 tonnes per capita per year, which falls in the Low range on our scale. The profile is distinctive: methane accounts for well over half of the impact, land‑use CO2 contributes about a quarter, nitrous oxide is around one‑tenth, and fossil CO2 remains comparatively small.
Methane Dominates The Story
Methane rose gradually through the post‑war era, accelerated in the early 2000s, and has eased since the mid‑2010s as emissions edged down and the warming impact from methane declined. Within methane, livestock and crop production are the main sources, while waste has grown steadily since the mid‑2000s from a smaller base. Land‑use CO2 shows more variability-relatively low earlier in the record, then generally higher since the mid‑1980s with year‑to‑year swings-highlighting the sensitivity of emissions to land management and vegetation change. Fossil CO2 from oil use has increased, especially since the 2010s, yet remains a minor share of Gambia's overall impact.
Priorities For Sustainable Growth
With a small global share and low historic per‑capita impact, Gambia's historic responsibility is limited, but there is a clear opportunity to lock in cleaner development. Focus on the largest sources: reduce methane from agriculture via improved herd management and manure handling, and adopt lower‑emission crop practices; and cut land‑use CO2 by protecting and restoring tree cover, strengthening sustainable land management, and expanding agroforestry. These steps can support development while avoiding the high‑emission pathways seen elsewhere.
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 PotentialTotal 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.
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