8/10/2022

Introduction: Do CO2 emissions impact life expectancy?

  • There is much debate on the impact of environmental degradation, often measured by CO2 emissions, on life expectancy with various studies concluding differently. Rahman et al. (2022) found that increasing carbon emissions were associated with a negative impact on life expectancy. Dunne (2020) reported on a study showing a limited relationship between CO2 emissions and life expectancy
  • Carbon emissions per person vary significantly between nations, as does Life Expectancy
  • Developed nations tend to have higher carbon emissions per person than poorer nations

Global CO2 Emissions dataset

  • ‘Global CO2 Emissions’ is a Public Domain dataset available on Kaggle
  • The intention of providing this dataset is to allow interested users to explore and understand key relationships between development, populations and life expectancy. This is an area of much interest with researchers such as Kashem and Rahman (2019) examining such relationships in the context of Bangladesh
  • This slideshow visualises some of the data, to highlight relationships between the data
  • The hope is to encourage public interest in this area to encourage policy makers to accelerate transitions toward a lower carbon economy

Exploring the data by continent

  • Per capita CO2 emissions in 2016 are dominated by a handful of countries
  • Posively, a number of countries have negative yearly growth in CO2 emissions
  • Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America tend to have lower life expectancy

Exploring the intesity of CO2 emissions in 2016 by country

Does population impact per capita CO2 emissions

Are yearly changes in CO2 emissions making a difference to life expectancy

Countries with higher CO2 emissions have greater life expectancy

Summary and Conclusion

  • As the exploratory charts show (and as widely reported in the media), based on this 2016 dataset, there do appear to be some significant differences between developed and developing countries in regards to CO2 emissions, population and life expectancy
  • Countries that already have higher CO2 emissions per capita than others appear to have longer life expectancy, however there isn’t a strong relationship between yearly per capita CO2 increases and life expectancy
  • In the main, population size doesn’t appear to have a strong relationship to per capita CO2 emissions
  • This dataset, albeit interesting, excludes the United States of America, as well as some other notable omissions
  • Following numerous climate change summits, will we see yearly growth in CO2 emissions reduce and more countries experience increased negative growth?

References

Dunne D (2020) Fossil fuel use not closely linked to longer life expectancy, study suggests, Carbon Brief, accessed 10 August 2022. https://www.carbonbrief.org/fossil-fuel-use-not-closely-linked-to-longer-life-expectancy-study-suggests/

Kashem, M and Rahman, M (2019) ‘CO2 Emissions and Development Indicators: a Causality Analysis for Bangladesh’, Environmental Processes 6: 433–455, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40710-019-00365-y

Rahman M, Rana R and Khanam R (2022) ‘Determinants of life expectancy in most polluted countries: Exploring the effect of environmental degradation’, PLoS ONE 17(1): e0262802. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262802

Sandhya S (2022) Global CO2 Emissions [dataset], Kaggle, accessed 10 August 2022. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sansuthi/global-co2-emissions

Statistics Times (2019) List of Countries by Continent [dataset], Statistics Times, accessed 10 August 2022. https://statisticstimes.com/geography/countries-by-continents.php