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Environment: treading lightly on the Earth

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Figure 10 is a world map with the continents and countries within them shown in outline. There are solid black circles superimposed over each country. The area of each circle represents the relative size of the estimated total carbon footprint in 2015 from the use of fossil fuels within that country in tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. The map shows for example that by far the largest total carbon footprint in the world is that of China, followed by the United States and India. Smaller in size and similar are the carbon footprints of Russia and Japan. The total carbon footprints of the UK, South Africa and Australia smaller still and also similar. The smallest total carbon footprints occur in many African developing countries. The actual sizes of the total carbon footprints can be found by hovering a cursor over online version of the map.

 2.3.2 Total carbon footprints