Private Jet Emissions Hit 16 Million Tonnes, Oxfam’s Disaster Divide Finds

Sixteen million tonnes. That is the private jet emissions total Oxfam assigns to a single year, 2025, in its Disaster Divide report, presented on Tuesday 27 October 2026 (Pollar / DPA). Put beside the user count, the number sharpens: Oxfam puts private jet users at about 250,000 people worldwide, which it equates with the richest 0.0003 percent of the global population. Information verified through 27 October 2026.

The report landed about two weeks before COP31, the UN climate conference in Türkiye. The timing is not an accident, and Oxfam does not pretend otherwise.

How much CO2 does a private jet emit per flight, on Oxfam’s count?

An average of 3.7 tonnes of CO2 per flight, Oxfam says — nearly as much as an average person worldwide produces in a full year (Pollar / DPA). The report’s sharpest comparison runs on a clock: in just two seconds, private jet flights produced more carbon than a person from the poorest half of the world’s population produces in an entire year.

National slices make the abstraction concrete. More than 55,000 private jets took off from German airports in 2025, producing over 182,000 tonnes of CO2, with Oxfam calculating that those jets emitted more in under half an hour than an average person in Germany emits in a year, against a German per-capita figure of 9.9 tonnes. Sweden’s version of the same release counts 8,500 private flights and 35,000 tonnes of CO2, and notes that the global total of 16 million tonnes is on a par with Sweden’s entire domestic transport sector (Sweden Herald). The Swedish analysis drew on the Private Jet Emissions Tracker built by the Institute for Policy Studies, which works from aircraft transponder signals; almost seven in ten private jets take off in the United States, Oxfam says.

Two methodological notes belong in the open. The DPA reporting states that Oxfam did not compare per-passenger emissions from private and commercial flights. And the Swedish figures cover private business jets, typically seating 4 to 19 passengers, with ambulance aircraft excluded from that country’s data. The headline total is an estimate built from tracker data, not a meter reading.

The richest 0.1 percent emissions figure behind the flights

Jets are the visible edge of a wider claim. Oxfam’s analysis says the richest 0.1 percent emissions exceed those of the poorest 3.5 billion people combined — roughly eight million people out-polluting nearly half of humanity (Pollar / DPA). Each person in that top group contributed almost 400 times more to today’s extreme heatwaves than someone in the bottom half, the analysis says, and the richest 1 percent accounts for 20 percent of global warming recorded since 1990.

Investments carry the larger tonnage. Oxfam examined the 2025 investments of 1,000 billionaires and found 71 percent of that money flowed into particularly polluting sectors — oil, gas and chemicals among them — contributing 486 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions in the Australian release of the findings (MediaNet / Oxfam Australia). The report also identifies 217 companies worldwide that, in Oxfam’s framing, profit from causing climate breakdown or from disaster preparedness, recovery and reconstruction. Oxfam estimates the richest group’s emissions could cause 1.9 million additional heat-related deaths in a single year, 78 percent of them in low or lower-middle income countries that account for only 8 percent of global emissions.

Oxfam’s people say it without varnish. “Ultra-rich people are driving the world into climate collapse,” said Manuel Schmitt, Oxfam’s referent for social inequality, in the German release. Oxfam International executive director Amitabh Behar said the ultra-rich were, in his words, setting fire to the planet and then making others pay for the fire extinguishers, as reported in the European coverage of the launch.

Private jet emissions: what Oxfam wants governments to do about it

The demands are aimed squarely at the governments meeting in Antalya for COP31. Oxfam calls for permanent taxes on wealth and high incomes, levies on fossil fuel companies and their excess profits, and taxes on high-emission luxury consumption such as private jets. In Sweden, Oxfam’s Hanna Nelson argued for a ban or at least a punitive tax on carbon-intensive luxury consumption, plus a progressive aviation tax under which frequent flyers pay more (Sweden Herald).

Analysis: read the numbers as an advocacy organisation’s best case, built for a conference fortnight — Oxfam campaigns for wealth taxes, and this report is an instrument of that campaign. That does not make the arithmetic invented; the flight data traces back to transponder records, and the per-flight figure sits close to earlier peer-reviewed estimates for private aviation. It does mean the framing choices — two seconds against a year, one flight against one person’s footprint — are chosen for pressure, not neutrality. Governments at COP31 will argue over tax design, not over whether 250,000 people should produce a mid-sized country’s transport emissions from the sky. That argument is now harder to dodge.

Sources

1. https://pollar.news/en/event/oxfam-slams-super-rich-emissions
2. https://swedenherald.com/article/8500-private-flights-took-off-from-sweden-last-year-emitting-35000-tonnes-of-co2-oxfam-says
3. https://newshub.medianet.com.au/2026/10/richest-0-1-of-australians-produce-31-times-more-carbon-pollution-than-poorest-half-of-the-population/178605/