Per capita greenhouse gas emissions including land use
- Description
Greenhouse gas emissions are measured in tonnes per person of carbon dioxide-equivalents over a 100-year timescale.
- Data source
- Jones et al. (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
- Unit
- tonnes of CO₂ equivalents per person
- Date range
- 1850-2024
- Last updated
- 2025-12-04
- Next expected update
- 2026-12-04
Show more Show less
Frequently asked questions
How did Our World in Data process this data?
How did Our World in Data process this 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.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
Emissions given in tonnes have been converted to carbon-dioxide equivalents over a 100-year timescale using a conversion factor of 273 for nitrous oxide, 29.8 for methane from fossil sources, and 27.2 for methane from agricultural and land use sources. These factors are taken from the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Data sources
Jones et al. – National contributions to climate change
Jones et al. – National contributions to climate change
A dataset describing the global warming response to national emissions CO2, CH4 and N2O from fossil and land use sources during 1851-2024.
National CO2 emissions data are collated from the Global Carbon Project (Andrew and Peters, 2025; Friedlingstein et al., 2025).
National CH4 and N2O emissions data are collated from PRIMAP-hist (HISTTP) (Gütschow et al., 2024).
We construct a time series of cumulative CO2-equivalent emissions for each country, gas, and emissions source (fossil or land use). Emissions of CH4 and N2O emissions are related to cumulative CO2-equivalent emissions using the Global Warming Potential (GWP*) approach, with best-estimates of the coefficients taken from the IPCC AR6 (Forster et al., 2021).
Warming in response to cumulative CO2-equivalent emissions is estimated using the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) approach, with best-estimate value of TCRE taken from the IPCC AR6 (Forster et al., 2021, Canadell et al., 2021). 'Warming' is specifically the change in global mean surface temperature (GMST).
The data files provide emissions, cumulative emissions and the GMST response by country, gas (CO2, CH4, N2O or 3-GHG total) and source (fossil emissions, land use emissions or the total).
Jones, Matthew W., Glen P. Peters, Thomas Gasser, Robbie M. Andrew, Clemens Schwingshackl, Johannes Gütschow, Richard A. Houghton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Julia Pongratz, and Corinne Le Quéré. “National Contributions to Climate Change Due to Historical Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide”. Scientific Data. Zenodo, November 13, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16640595.Various sources – Population
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
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sourcesHow to cite
How to cite this page
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 greenhouse gas emissions including land use”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions”. Data adapted from Jones et al., Various sources. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-215053/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions.html [online resource] (archived on October 22, 2026).How to cite this data
How to cite this data
If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Jones et al. (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Jones et al. (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Per capita greenhouse gas emissions including land use” [dataset]. Jones et al., “National contributions to climate change 2025.1”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved October 22, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-215053/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions.html (archived on October 22, 2026).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.
Download
Quick download
You can download the visualization as an image or download the chart data.