Global and regional changes in carbon dioxide emissions: 1970-2019

TL;DR

This paper introduces new frameworks to analyze global and regional CO2 emission patterns over 50 years, revealing shifts in emission trajectories, spatial dispersion, and economic correlations among countries.

Contribution

It presents novel methods for classifying countries by emission patterns, analyzes decade-wise changes, and explores spatial and economic relationships in CO2 emissions.

Findings

Most countries fit a one change point piecewise linear model.

Decade-by-decade shifts in emission cluster structures.

Peak in spatial emission dispersion occurred in 2000.

Abstract

We introduce new frameworks to study spatio-temporal patterns in carbon dioxide emissions, demographic trends and economic patterns across 50 countries over the past 50 years. Our analysis is broken up into four sections. First, we introduce a new method to classify countries into one of three characteristic emissions classes based on a one, two or three-segment piecewise linear model. We reveal that most countries are best represented by a piecewise linear model with one change point. Next, we perform a decade-by-decade study of carbon dioxide trajectories. There, we demonstrate notable changes in cluster structures in each decade. We then study the spatial propagation of emissions over time, highlighting a peak in spatial dispersion in 2000, beyond which there has been a gradual decline in spatial emissions variance over space. Finally, we use carbon dioxide, GDP, and population data and apply dimensionality reduction and clustering to group countries based on similarity in their real and carbon economies.