The climate change it has become one of the most pressing political issues of our time. After years confined to the margins of public debate, today he has a key role on the agenda of political parties, either to favor palliative measures or to oppose an economic reconversion that limits its effects. The preponderance of the environment on the media agenda has caused the causes and especially those responsible for the problem to be examined.
An exam, of course, complex. Asserting that climate change is an emergency that requires drastic measures is easy. Much more difficult is to identify and implement them. The first step for the latter requires a thorough analysis of the facts. This Our World in Data graph, made with data collected by Climate Watch and the World Resources Institute, offers relevant statistics on which sectors of the world economy are contributing the most to the deterioration of the planet.
At the top appears the “Energy“, a vast semantic container under which a multitude of actors operate. Its emissions represent 73% of the world total after one year, an unavoidable percentage. Of course, not all activities or businesses have the same weight. The industry is almost a quarter of the total emissions associated with energy supply (24%), followed by energy used to illuminate or heat buildings (17%) and transport in general (16%).
In the three categories there are distinctions to be made.
Within “Industry”, for example, the most relevant sector is metallurgy (7.2%), followed by petrochemicals (3.6%) and agri-food just over 1%). “Other industries” in aggregate account for 10%. Within transport, in turn, not all sectors are equally important: road is the most damaging (11%), while both aviation (1.9%) and maritime (1.7%) are more far. This forces to rethink all strategies. Cars are a bigger problem than airplanes, on which the debate has focused to some extent.
The next relevant macrosector in terms of emissions is the farming, including here livestock and forest use (18% of the total). This is where the environmental cost of livestock farming (almost 6% of total emissions) stands out, as well as deforestation (a not inconsiderable 2.2%) or the burning of fields for various reasons (3.5% , let’s remember what happens in Indonesia every year). Finally, we would have both waste management (3.2%) and “Industry”, understood as the emissions derived from its activity, not the energy required to supply it (5.2%).
The graph is very intuitive and offers a window to understand a) how the world works b) the impact that this operation has on the planet and c) which sectors must be regulated if emissions are to be reduced immediately.