What is climate change? - Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction - page 10

Who produces the pollution?
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created to
produce the first international agreement on reducing global GHG emissions. However, this
task is not as simple as it first appears, as CO 2 emissions are not evenly produced by coun-
tries. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see Box 1 ) the first
major source of CO 2 is the burning of fossil fuels, since four-fifths of global CO 2 emissions
comes from energy production, industrial processes, and transport. These are not evenly
distributed around the world because of the unequal distribution of industry and wealth;
North America, Europe, and Asia emit over 90 per cent of the global, industrially produced
CO 2 (see Figure 4 ). Moreover, historically the developed nations have emitted much more
than less developed countries.
The second major source, accounting for one-fifth of global CO 2 emissions, is as a result of
land-use changes. These emissions come primarily from the cutting down of forests for the
purposes of agriculture, urbanization, or roads. When large areas of rainforests are cut
down, the land often turns into less productive grassland with considerably reduced capa-
city for storing CO 2 . Here the pattern of CO 2 emissions is different, with South America,
Asia, and Africa being responsible for over 90 per cent of present-day land-use change
emissions. This raises important ethical questions because it is difficult to tell these coun-
tries to stop deforestation when historically this had already occurred in much of North
America and Europe before the beginning of the 20th century. In terms of the amount of
CO 2 released, industrial processes still significantly outweigh land-use changes.