Our World
in Data
It’s Giving Season. Help us do more with a donation.
Data

Per capita CO₂ emissions

GCB
See all data and research on:
CO2 & Greenhouse Gas Emissions

What you should know about this indicator

  • Per capita emissions represent the emissions of an average person in a country or region - they are calculated as the total emissions divided by population.
  • This data is based on territorial emissions, which do not account for emissions embedded in traded goods.
  • Emissions from international aviation and shipping are not included in any country or region's emissions. They are only included in the global total emissions.
Per capita CO₂ emissions
GCB
Annual total emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), excluding land-use change, measured in tonnes per person.
Source
Global Carbon Budget (2024); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 21, 2024
Next expected update
November 2025
Date range
1750–2023
Unit
tonnes per person

Related research and writing

CO₂ emissions

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser
Thumbnail

Per capita, national, historical: how do countries compare on CO2 metrics?

Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser

Many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions, even if we take offshored production into account

Hannah Ritchie
Featured image

How do CO2 emissions compare when we adjust for trade?

Hannah Ritchie

Where in the world do people emit the most CO2?

Hannah Ritchie

Explore charts that include this data

Are per capita CO₂ emissions above or below the global average?
Chart 1 of 15

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Global Carbon Budget was founded by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) international science team to track the trends in global carbon emissions and sinks and is a key measure of progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. It's widely recognized as the most comprehensive report of its kind.

The GCP has been publishing estimates of global and national fossil CO2 emissions since 2001. In the first instance these were simple re-publications of data from another source, but over subsequent years refinements have been made in response to feedback and identification of inaccuracies.

Retrieved on
November 21, 2024
Retrieved from
https://globalcarbonbudget.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Andrew, R. M., & Peters, G. P. (2024). The Global Carbon Project's fossil CO2 emissions dataset (2024v17) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13981696
The data files of the Global Carbon Budget can be found at: https://globalcarbonbudget.org/carbonbudget/
For more details, see the original paper:
Friedlingstein, P., O'Sullivan, M., Jones, M. W., Andrew, R. M., Bakker, D. C. E., Hauck, J., Landschützer, P., Le Quéré, C., Luijkx, I. T., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Alin, S. R., Anthoni, P., Barbero, L., Bates, N. R., Becker, M., Bellouin, N., Decharme, B., Bopp, L., Brasika, I. B. M., Cadule, P., Chamberlain, M. A., Chandra, N., Chau, T.-T.-T., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Cronin, M., Dou, X., Enyo, K., Evans, W., Falk, S., Feely, R. A., Feng, L., Ford, D. J., Gasser, T., Ghattas, J., Gkritzalis, T., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Gürses, Ö., Harris, I., Hefner, M., Heinke, J., Houghton, R. A., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Jacobson, A. R., Jain, A., Jarníková, T., Jersild, A., Jiang, F., Jin, Z., Joos, F., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Kennedy, D., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Korsbakken, J. I., Körtzinger, A., Lan, X., Lefèvre, N., Li, H., Liu, J., Liu, Z., Ma, L., Marland, G., Mayot, N., McGuire, P. C., McKinley, G. A., Meyer, G., Morgan, E. J., Munro, D. R., Nakaoka, S.-I., Niwa, Y., O'Brien, K. M., Olsen, A., Omar, A. M., Ono, T., Paulsen, M., Pierrot, D., Pocock, K., Poulter, B., Powis, C. M., Rehder, G., Resplandy, L., Robertson, E., Rödenbeck, C., Rosan, T. M., Schwinger, J., Séférian, R., Smallman, T. L., Smith, S. M., Sospedra-Alfonso, R., Sun, Q., Sutton, A. J., Sweeney, C., Takao, S., Tans, P. P., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Tsujino, H., Tubiello, F., van der Werf, G. R., van Ooijen, E., Wanninkhof, R., Watanabe, M., Wimart-Rousseau, C., Yang, D., Yang, X., Yuan, W., Yue, X., Zaehle, S., Zeng, J., and Zheng, B.: Global Carbon Budget 2023, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 5301-5369, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-5301-2023, 2023.

Our World in Data builds and maintains a long-run dataset on population by country, region, and for the world, based on various sources.

You can find more information on these sources and how our time series is constructed on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • Data on global emissions has been converted from tonnes of carbon to tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) using a conversion factor of 3.664.
  • Emissions from the Kuwaiti oil fires in 1991 have been included as part of Kuwait's emissions for that year.
  • Country's share of the global population is calculated using our population dataset, based on different sources.
  • Each country's share of global CO₂ emissions from flaring has been calculated using global CO₂ emissions from flaring provided in the Global Carbon Budget dataset.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Per capita CO₂ emissions”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions”. Data adapted from Global Carbon Project, Various sources. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Global Carbon Budget (2024); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Global Carbon Budget (2024); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Per capita CO₂ emissions – GCB” [dataset]. Global Carbon Project, “Global Carbon Budget”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved December 21, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita