What's left, and where it goes.
Roughly thirty-seven gigatonnes of carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere every year. The Global Carbon Project tallies the source, the destination and the ceiling. Four chart types we have not used yet — a treemap, a bubble pack, a dot waffle and a stripe chart — walk through the four faces of the budget.
The world's emissions, laid out as a quilt.
A treemap puts every sub-sector as a rectangle of proportional size, grouped by colour. The biggest tile is electricity and heat — a quarter of everything we emit. Then road transport, deforestation, then a long tail. Hover any tile to isolate it.
Numbers in percent of total CO₂. Source: IPCC AR6 / Our World in Data sector breakdown, 2019 baseline.
Layout via squarified treemap algorithm (Bruls, Huijsmans, van Wijk 2000). Colours encode the five main groups: ember = energy, blue = industry, green = land use and agriculture, gold = transport, violet = buildings. Numbers in percent of total CO₂ emissions.
Ten countries, ten very different weights.
A bubble pack instead of a bar chart. Each circle is a country, area proportional to its 2023 emissions. China outweighs the next two together. Then a sharp falloff, and a long tail of mid-sized emitters that together rival India.
Top 10 fossil + land-use CO₂ emitters, 2023. Together they account for about 70% of global emissions.
Hover any circle for total and share. Bubble area scales linearly with gigatonnes — a circle with twice the area carries twice the emissions, not twice the diameter. Source: Global Carbon Budget 2024.
A hundred dots, six of them ours.
Each dot in the grid is roughly 34 gigatonnes of CO₂ — about one year of human emissions at current rates. Dark dots are already spent (everything emitted since 1750). Bright dots are the remaining 1.5°C budget. Gold dots are the additional headroom up to 2°C. The bright stripe is shockingly short.
One dot ≈ 34 Gt CO₂ ≈ one year of current global emissions. Total of 100 dots = roughly the 2°C-budget envelope (3400 Gt) since 1750.
Carbon budgets are IPCC AR6 (67% probability of staying below the threshold), measured from January 2024. Annual emissions of ~37 Gt mean the 1.5°C budget runs out in about five years at current rates; the 2°C budget in about twenty-four.
From cool blue to deep red.
One vertical stripe per year, from 1850 to 2023. Cool blue means low annual emissions, deep red means high. The shift from blue to red happens within two human lifetimes. To the right of the dividing line, three wider bands show what the three plausible futures would look like in the same colour code: current policies (red), a 2°C-pathway (gold) and a 1.5°C-pathway (green).
Inspired by Ed Hawkins' "warming stripes" (2018) but coloured by annual emissions rather than temperature anomaly. The 1.5°C and 2°C bands are the average emission level over 2024-2050 in IPCC-compatible scenarios. Current policies are from Climate Action Tracker.
Six dots out of a hundred. That is what is left of the 1.5°C budget — and the world spends roughly one dot every six years.
Data: Global Carbon Budget 2024 (Friedlingstein et al., Earth System Science Data), IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report 2023, Our World in Data + Climate Watch sector breakdown, Climate Action Tracker for scenario pathways · All charts multi-trigger on viewport re-entry