Oxfam: Britons' carbon output tops Africans' many times over

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The average British person will pump out more carbon emissions in two weeks than a citizen in any of seven African nations will emit in an entire year, the charity Oxfam said in a report Sunday.

Researchers at the British-based aid agency said a typical U.K resident's carbon dioxide emissions would take just five days to equal the amount emitted annually by a Rwandan.

It would take 12 days for a British person to surpass the annual carbon output in six more African nations per capita: Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Madagascar, Guinea and Burkina Faso, Oxfam said.

The group came to its conclusions based on calculations using per capita emissions data compiled by the Global Carbon Atlas, which tracks global greenhouse gas emissions. Oxfam used data from 2017, the last year for which complete data is available.

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Citation: Oxfam: Britons' carbon output tops Africans' many times over (2020, January 5) retrieved 16 April 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2020-01-oxfam-uk-equals-african-nations.html
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