Turkmenistan's Historic Contribution to Global Warming Since 1850
Key Insights
Historic Warming Impact At A Glance
Turkmenistan's historic emissions have contributed roughly 6,600 megatonnes to global warming since the mid-19th century. While this is only around 0.2% of the global total, its population-weighted historic per capita impact is extremely high, at around 18 tonnes per capita per year-well above the "Extremely High" threshold. This contrast highlights a small global share but a very large contribution per person over time.
Drivers And Long-Run Trends
Fossil carbon dioxide makes up the largest share of Turkmenistan's impact (roughly 2,700 megatonnes), with methane close behind (about 2,200), and land-use carbon dioxide adding around 1,300; nitrous oxide is a smaller part. Fossil CO2 rose slowly before the post-war era, climbed rapidly through the later 20th century, eased in the early 1990s, and then surged again from the late 1990s, with recent years approaching around 100 megatonnes per year. Within this, gas-related CO2 has become dominant, accelerating since the mid‑2000s toward roughly 60-80 megatonnes per year, while oil-related CO2 grew through the 1970s and then settled around 10-20 megatonnes per year. Land-use emissions were higher mid‑century and have gradually trended downward into the single digits. Methane emissions increased steadily-especially since the mid‑1990s-led by fugitive emissions, with livestock adding a growing share; as emissions rose, their near‑term warming influence intensified. Nitrous oxide edged up after the 1990s, and fluorinated gases remain tiny but rising.
Actionable Pathways For Leadership
Given its extremely high per capita impact, Turkmenistan can show leadership by rapidly cutting the largest sources: fossil CO2 from gas and oil, methane from fugitive emissions and livestock, and land‑use CO2. Priorities include accelerating clean energy and efficiency to reduce fossil CO2, aggressively curbing methane leaks across the gas system, improving livestock practices to slow methane growth, and protecting and restoring landscapes to keep land‑use CO2 low. Swift progress in these areas would meaningfully lower the country's temperature contribution and support broader global efforts.
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