Mongolia's Sources of CO₂ Emissions

Key Insights

Land-Use Shaped The Past

Across the historical record, Mongolia's CO2 profile has been dominated by land-use change-around four-fifths of national CO2 emissions and nearly half of overall climate impact. Net land-use emissions rose into the early 20th century, plunged through the mid-century, then spiked in the post-war years, peaking near 80 megatonnes in the mid-1950s. From the late 1960s to the 1990s they eased, and since the late 1990s they have fallen sharply toward zero, at times turning slightly negative.

Coal’s Modern Surge

By contrast, fossil emissions-especially coal-were modest and fairly steady for decades. Since the mid-2000s, coal emissions have accelerated, climbing from low single digits to around 40 megatonnes by the early 2020s, making coal the leading fossil source and a growing driver of national emissions.

Oil And Industry Emerge Slowly

Oil use has trended up in steps, particularly since 2008, reaching roughly 5 megatonnes. Other fossil processes remain tiny, though they have inched higher in the past decade. Gas is negligible in Mongolia's mix.

Priorities For The 2020s

Today, the dominant sources are on divergent paths: land-use emissions are declining and hovering near balance, while coal is still rising. Sustaining land stewardship to keep net absorption and, above all, reversing the coal trajectory will matter most for bending Mongolia's emissions curve.

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 Emissions
Earth 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: Megatonne
Wikipedia: Global warming potential

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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.