Suriname's Yearly Greenhouse Gas Emissions in CO₂ Equivalent

✨ Key Insights

Early Industrial Activity and Emissions

Suriname's journey of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions began with notable industrial activities such as bauxite mining in 1916. This marked the start of significant CO₂ emissions due to energy-intensive processes and land clearing. The expansion of rice cultivation around 1950 further contributed to emissions, particularly methane, due to the anaerobic decomposition in rice paddies.

Impact of Infrastructure and Policy Changes

The construction of the Afobaka Dam in 1964 and subsequent industrial developments led to a rise in CO₂ emissions. The dam's creation resulted in the flooding of large forest areas, releasing CO₂ from decomposing vegetation. Suriname's independence in 1975 brought shifts in economic policies, likely increasing emissions from fossil fuels and land-use changes. However, the 1980 military coup and economic decline temporarily reduced industrial activity and emissions.

Conservation Efforts and Modern Challenges

In 1992, Suriname initiated forest conservation efforts, aiming to curb deforestation-related emissions. The expansion of gold mining around 2000, however, countered these efforts by increasing deforestation and CO₂ emissions. Participation in the REDD+ program in 2010 sought to mitigate these impacts. More recently, oil exploration and production have become significant contributors to Suriname's emissions profile, highlighting the ongoing challenge of balancing economic growth with environmental sustainability.

Background

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main drivers of human-induced warming. In the scientific literature, human-induced emissions are often referred to as anthropogenic emissions.

CO₂ Fossil Fuels and Industry (CO₂ FFI)
CO₂ Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (CO₂ LULUCF)
Methane (CH₄)
Moderate: above 2.5 tonnes
Nitrous oxide (N₂O)
Fluorinated gases (F-gases)

Emissions from all different gases are expressed in CO₂-equivalent units to make it possible to compare the relative emissions from these different gases. CO₂-equivalents are calculated using the global warming potentials of the respective gases, in this case using a 100-year time horizon.

Wikipedia: Global Warming Potential

Total Historic Share

CO₂ From Fossil Fuels and Industry

The sources are mostly fossil-fuel combustion emissions from coal, oil, and gas, as well as emissions from industrial processes such as cement production. Cement also absorbs CO₂ out of the atmosphere through carbonation, which reduces emissions by about 0.8 Gt per year and is included here.

CO₂ From Land-Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry

The main driver of these emissions is deforestation, which includes logging and forest degradation, as well as other land-use change activities. The emissions also take into account the absorption of CO₂ by processes that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, such as afforestation and reforestation. It is the net effect that is indicated here.

Methane (CH₄)

Methane emissions are caused by human activities such as rearing livestock, agricultural practices, and fugitive fossil fuel emissions.

Nitrous Oxide (N₂O)

Common sources of these emissions are fossil fuel emissions and the agricultural use of synthetic fertilizer and manure.

Fluorinated Gases (F-gases)

Fluorinated gases are a group of gases defined by UNFCCC: hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). Fluorinated gases are also known as halogenated gases.

Wikipedia: Greenhouse Gas Emissions
IPCC: Annual Report 6, 5.2.1 5.2 Historical Trends, Variability and Budgets of CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O

Units and Measures

CO₂-equivalent 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 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.

The Key Insights paragraph was generated using a large language model (LLM) using a structured approach to improve the accuracy. This included 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.