Qatar’s gas output increase could cause catastrophic global heating, report says

Saad Sherida al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister and chief executive of QatarEnergy, said last month Qatar will ‘provide reliable and credible LNG supply solutions to customers across the globe’. Photograph: Imad Creidi/Reuters

Qatar’s longest-lasting legacy following the World Cup won’t be football or even its human rights record – it will be the climate crisis, according to a new report warning that its huge expansion of gas extraction could push the planet into catastrophic global heating.

Should Qatar exploit all of its oil and gas reserves it will eventually add an enormous 50bn metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere once burned, which is more than the entire annual emissions of the whole world, the new research, shared with the Guardian, has found.