Carbon Footprint
Five questions about travel, home and food give a rough annual CO2 figure. Global mean is 4.7 tonnes per person; the US averages about 16.
Your footprint is lower than
1%
of people worldwide. The global mean is 4.7 tonnes a person; 99% emit less than you do.
Footprint breakdown
Country comparison
Global carbon distribution
Lower is better, so further left on the chart is better
In trees
A mature tree takes up roughly 22 kg of CO₂ a year, so absorbing your footprint would keep about 486 trees busy all year. How we compare: a normal curve with mean 4.7 and SD 2.8 tonnes; the real distribution has a long right tail, so high footprints are more common than it says.
In context
The United States averages about 14.5 tonnes a person a year; India about 1.9. A return flight from London to New York is close to a tonne a seat, which is roughly half a year of an average Indian's total. The richest 10% of people worldwide account for about half of all emissions, by Oxfam and SEI estimates. Your 10.8 tonnes is a rough five-question figure, not an audit.
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Look up a value: Is 8 tonnes of CO2 a lot? and other percentile lookups.
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About this test
Pick your diet, car, home energy and shopping habits. The module adds up tonnes of CO₂ per year using EPA emission factors plus a 1.5 tonne baseline for shared services and infrastructure, then places the total on a normal curve with mean 4.7 tonnes and SD 2.8. The mean is the global per-person figure from the Global Carbon Budget 2024 via Our World in Data.
National averages vary by a factor of 10 or more. In the module's table the US is at 14.5 tonnes a year, Australia 15.1, Japan 8.7, Germany 7.9, Norway 7.5, the UK 5.5, Sweden 3.8, India 1.9. The percentile is inverted: a lower footprint means a higher score.
What is the average carbon footprint per person?
About 4.7 tonnes of CO₂ a year worldwide (Global Carbon Budget 2024, via Our World in Data). Americans and Australians average around 15 tonnes, Germans about 8, Indians under 2. The module treats 4.7 as the mean and 2.8 as the SD.
How much does diet change my footprint?
In the module's EPA-based factors, a heavy-meat diet is 4.5 tonnes a year, an omnivore diet 3.3, vegetarian 1.7 and vegan 1.5. Switching from heavy meat to vegetarian saves about as much as giving up a large petrol car (2.5 tonnes).
What is a good carbon footprint?
Under about 2 tonnes a year per person is the level usually cited as consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2050. That is well below the global mean of 4.7 and a long way below the rich-country average. Diet, flights and car mileage move the total most.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Carbon Footprint module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.