Total Tons of CO2 by Country & Population

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/11143854/

World Bank Open Data

Data Source: Data World Bank

How I made this visualization

Ask

Which country produces the most carbon emission?

This was the question I asked myself when I started this project. I’ll be honest, I’m not the most informed when it comes to greenhouse gases, global warming, and environmental awareness. However, as I was studying one night, this question came to me and in an effort to learn more about this issue, I decided to make a visualization.

Prepare

In order to get CO2 emission data for the visual, I looked to the World Bank data page as it is a reliable data source. To my knowledge, you cannot access the entire database, so you have to search up the data by topic and get the data from separate tables. These are the tables I downloaded from the website:

  1. CO2 Emissions (Tons Per Capita) by Country
  2. kt (kilotons) of CO2 Emitted by Country
  3. Population by Country

Process

Now that I have acquired three separate datasets it was time to process them. This is how the original tables look.

Total Green House Emissions CO2 Equivalent by Country

Total Green House Emissions CO2 Equivalent by Country

As you can see, there is a lot of clutter and columns that aren’t needed for our purposes, but that’s the point of the process phase! It was time to clean up the tables to make them usable for analysis. So here’s what I did:

  1. I got rid of the Series Name, Series Code, and Country Code columns as they weren’t necessary.
  2. I used the power of conditional formatting in order to color the cells red if they had the value of .. and filtered the sheet to show me any .. values and cleared those values.
    1. Since instead of using null values for missing values, they used dots .. to indicate that it was missing a value. This is all well and good but for our purposes, we want the data to be as clean as possible and I didn’t want the dots to interfere with any values.