CO₂ emissions per capita

CO₂ emissions per capita

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from burning fossil fuels and industrial processes. This includes emissions from transport, electricity generation, and heating, but not land-use change.
Unit: tonnes per person
Last updated: 2025-11-13
Next expected update: 2026-11-13
Managed by: Pablo Rosado

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change.
Global CO₂ emissions have stayed just below five tonnes per person for over a decade. But across countries, emissions vary widely, rising in some, falling in others.
Fossil fuel burning is the main source of CO₂ emissions. This data includes fossil CO₂ emissions from activities such as transport, electricity generation, and heating.

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These figures don't include CO₂ emissions from changes in land use, like deforestation or reforestation.
Emissions from international aviation and shipping are not included in the data for any individual country or region. They are only counted in the global total.
This data is based on territorial emissions, meaning the emissions produced within a country's borders, but not those from imported goods. For example, emissions from imported steel are counted in the country where the steel is produced. To learn more and look at emissions adjusted for trade, read our article: How do CO₂ emissions compare when we adjust for trade?
The data comes from the Global Carbon Budget. Fossil CO₂ emissions are estimated using national statistics on energy use — such as coal, oil, and gas consumption — and industrial production, particularly cement. These figures are converted into CO₂ emissions using standardized emission factors. For more details, read the Global Carbon Budget paper.
CO₂ emissions per capita are calculated by dividing emissions by population. They represent the average emissions per person in a country or region. To learn more about how different metrics capture the distribution of CO₂ emissions, read our article: Per capita, national, historical: how do countries compare on CO2 metrics?

Data sources

Global Carbon Project – Global Carbon Budget

The Global Carbon Budget was established by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) to track global carbon emissions and sinks.

This dataset makes it possible to assess whether countries are making progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement and is widely recognized as the most comprehensive report of its kind.

Since 2001, the GCP has published estimates of global and national fossil CO₂ emissions. Initially, these were simple republished data from other sources, but over time, refinements were made based on feedback and correction of inaccuracies.

Retrieved on

November 13, 2025

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.

Andrew, R. M., & Peters, G. P. (2025). The Global Carbon Project's fossil CO2 emissions dataset (2025v15) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17417124
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.

Various sources – Population

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

March 31, 2026

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.

The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Citations

How should I cite this data in a news article?

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

Global Carbon Budget (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

How should I cite this in an academic article or report?

Global Carbon Budget (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “CO₂ emissions per capita” [dataset]. Global Carbon Project, “Global Carbon Budget v15”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved June 12, 2026 from https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

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. 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.

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Data URL (CSV format)

https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Metadata URL (JSON format)

https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets

=IMPORTDATA("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

Python with Pandas

import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()

R

library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

Stata

import delimited "https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear