Global CO2 Emissions

Overview

As a data analyst with Maven Environmental, a US-based environmental non-profit, I was tasked with leveraging CO2 emission data to create a dashboard for the public to use to identify patterns, trends, and drivers of global CO2 Emissions.

Key Insights

• Africa and South America are the continents that contribute the least to global emissions, while countries in North America and Europe contribute the most
• Qatar is the country contributing the most per capita, but it's only a small overall contributor to global emissions because of its small size
• There's a positive correlation between the population size of a country and its total CO2 emissions
• China eclipsed the US in global share of emissions in 2006--due in large part to its high population, as its per capita emissions are much lower than the US and other western countries
• The US is making progress towards lowering emissions, with significant drops in per capital emissions since 2000

Approach

This data set was relatively clean, although a few tweaks were necessary:

• Excluding null ISO values at the data source level to eliminate sub-groupings so the analyst could focus on countries
• Change CO2 fields that were incorrectly categories as dimensions into measures so they could be used in aggregation

I created a few simple visualizations to tell the story and allow for further exploration:

• A line chart showing trends over time for the countries with the largest share of CO2 emissions. This was paired with a Top N (set at 10) filter to make the visualization more clear and less busy.
• A country-level map that's color-coded to show the countries with the largest per-capita emissions in 2021
• A scatter plot comparing CO2 emissions vs population at the country level