The world’s carbon dioxide emissions exceeded 36 billion tons in 2017*. The numbers will keep climbing if we don’t take action.
* from 2 billion tons per year in 1900.
Here we share a few basic facts about how much carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere each year, the major drivers of climate change, and how climate change and species extinctions are intertwined.
The bottom line is that we all own climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions are unavoidable, but leaving a carbon footprint is not. Calculating your carbon footprint is a great first step to understanding how your consumption patterns affect your carbon footprint .
FAQ’s about Climate Change
The global average annual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere averaged 407.4 ppm in 2018, up 2.4 ppm since 2017. This is a major increase from pre-industrial levels, which ranged between 180 and 280 ppm.
About 10 billion tons of carbon are added to the atmosphere each year. That equates to 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that traps heat and causes global warming.
Deforestation — of which the burning of tropical forests is the major component —contributes about 10% of those emissions.
Tropical deforestation is the major driver of the species extinction rate, now one thousand times the natural rate.
Deforestation causing both extinctions and climate change is bad enough. Even worse, is that their effects multiply. Even simple warming pushes species higher in mountainous areas to keep within habitable temperatures. There is abundant evidence that species are doing this and, when they do, their ranges shrink. This means they have less viable habitat.
Species moving uphill to keep cool may not be able to do so, because habitat loss has fragmented the landscape and species cannot safely move from one isolated fragment to another. Ultimately, some may lose all the places that are habitable and so go extinct. Tragically, many montane species have been spared major habitat loss because of their remoteness. Their extinctions from climate shifts add to those extinctions in lowland areas.
Sea levels are rising by an average of 1 inch every five years due to climate change.
Scientists estimate that 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by 2050.
Global Emissions
Scroll over each country in the interactive map of carbon emissions below to see how carbon dioxide emissions vary across the world. In general, the oil producing countries in the Middle East top the charts, followed by developed countries. Scroll over each country in the map below to see how carbon dioxide emissions vary across the world.
A View of Climate Change From Space
NASA has a unique vantage point of what is happening in our climate. We are sharing some of their compelling visuals that provide unparalleled insight into the state of our planet’s resilience.
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Watch Forests Soak Up Carbon
An ultra-high-resolution NASA simulation shows how forests are on the front lines for reversing climate change. The model illustrates distinct swings in global carbon dioxide concentrations as the growth cycle of plants and trees changes with the seasons.
Play Video
See How the Planet Has Warmed
While scientists expect temperatures to fluctuate from year to year, the planet's average temperature has increased about 1.4oF since 1880. This trend is largely driven by increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Why Plant Trees?
Experts agree that we will not meet our goals for mitigating climate change without forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Climate change is viewed through many lenses, but each leads you to the same conclusion – something must be done to restore the resiliency of our planet to offset anthropogenic changes to our environment. Restoring the world’s forestsis the answer.
Trees have been quietly offsetting these carbon emissions for centuries, converting carbon dioxide into the oxygen we need for life. in fact, large areas of once tropical forest are better for growing carbon better than growing cattle.
Tropical moist forests soak up about 26 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per hectare each year. Of course, that number depends on various factors, including how wet is the climate, how warm, and how good the soil — but its a good average, though perhaps on the conservative side.
It's Time for Action
Species do not have the option of waiting for governments to do something to reverse climate change. For them, climate change has already made their habitat too warm. As a result, they are moving towards the poles and, in the tropics, to higher elevations. That is when they can.
The forests we restore to create wildlife corridors are a critical link between fragmented habitats that allow species to move freely again. In addition, these wildlife corridors allow species ways to escape habitats for cooler ones upslope.
It’s a near-immediate solution — we know that forest species start moving through our reforested corridors within a few years of our planting them. Put simply, reconnecting fragmented landscapes is the only practical, immediate solution, to the pressing problem of species going extinct in isolated forest patches that are becoming to warm for them.
The “Weeds” – an Annotated Reference List
We prefer John Holdren’s term “climate disruption” because “warming” suggests something gradual and simple. The actual changes are neither. (https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/global-climate-disruption-what-do-we-know-what-should-we-do)
Forero-Medina G, Terborgh J, Socolar SJ, Pimm SL. Elevational ranges of birds on a tropical montane gradient lag behind warming temperatures. PLoS One. 2011 Dec 7;6(12):e28535. One of a small number of studies that compares species ranges on mountains over decades. It shows species are moving upslope in response to warming temperature.
Pimm SL. The World According to Pimm: a Scientists Audits the Earth McGraw-Hill; 2001. Considers how much of the land human actions have appropriated — and, inter alia, how much tropical forest has become cropland and grazing land.
Pimm SL. Biodiversity: climate change or habitat loss—which will kill more species? Current Biology. 2008 Feb 12;18(3):R117-9. Examines the relative contributions of habitat loss and climate change in causing species extinctions. Show that extinctions from climate change add to those from habitat loss.
Pimm SL. Climate disruption and biodiversity. Current Biology. 2009 Jul 28;19(14):R595-601. Reviews the complexity of climate changes and the even more complex ecological responses.
Pimm SL, Jenkins CN, Abell R, Brooks TM, Gittleman JL, Joppa LN, Raven PH, Roberts CM, Sexton JO. The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection. Science. 2014 May 30;344(6187):1246752.
Pimm SL, Russell GJ, Gittleman JL, Brooks TM. The future of biodiversity. Science. 1995 Jul 21;269(5222):347-50.The earlier Science review is the source of Al Gore’s comment (2006) in An Inconvenient Truth “of … a mass extinction crisis, with a rate of extinction now 1,000 times higher than the normal background rate.” The two reviews detail the rate of extinction and the underlying causes.
For carbon calculations see section on “how to become carbon neutral.”
Kulp, S.A., Strauss, B.H. New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Nat Commun 10, 4844 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12808-z. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z