Carbon emissions through time - the CDIAC-FF project

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production have varied greatly over time and between countries. Using UN data about fuel production, imports, exports, and more—along with data from other sources—the CDIAC-FF project estimates atmospheric carbon emissions (mostly in the form of CO2) for countries around the world from 1750 to nearly the present day.The files here quantify these carbon emission estimates. Our main approach is the “reference approach,” in which fuel use is calculated from flows (e.g., production, imports, exports, stock changes) and carbon emission are based on that. The carbon emission data spans from 1750-2022 for different countries and is separated into liquid, solid, and gas fuels as well as gas flaring and venting. Carbon emissions from cement production is calculated separately and included as well. Data is primarily saved as million metric tons of carbon (Mt C) for the global file or thousand metric tons of carbon (kt C) for the national file, as well as metric tons (t C) per person for the per capita values. The main results from this calculation are stored in the following files:global.1750-2022.xlsx: Carbon emissions by fuel type from 1750-2022 for the globenation.1750-2022.xlsx: Carbon emissions by fuel type from 1750-2022 for individual nationsTwo additional files contain the total and per capita emissions for the most recent year (2022). These files are a subset of the data in “nation.1750-2022.xlsx,” and are presented separately for ease of use:total.2022.xlsx: Total carbon emissions for each nation during 2022per_capita.2022.xlsx: Per capita carbon emissions for each nation during 2022The final file, “sectoral.1995-2022.xlsx,” presents carbon emissions using a different approach. Instead of estimating carbon emissions from fuel production, imports, exports, etc., this secondary approach uses direct estimates of fuel usage in different sectors of the economy, such as electricity and heat generation, transportation, and more. Total emissions from this “sectoral” approach tend to be smaller than those in reference approach, likely due mostly to incomplete data, and this approach only covers the years 1995-2022. Because of these limitations, we consider the “reference” files above as our primary dataset, while this secondary dataset provides an additional perspective on what sectors of the economy are producing the carbon emissions. This data file is:sectoral.1995-2022.xlsx: Carbon emissions by sector from 1995-2022 for individual nations and regionsA more complete description of the methods, data, and results will be presented in Erb & Marland (in press). The website https://scidata.appstate.edu/carbon/ provides interactive charts to easily visualize much of the data in these files. Country codes in the data are the UN M49 codes. Country names come from the UN fuel dataset and do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors.A previous version of this dataset was described in Gilfillan & Marland (2021), with that dataset archived at Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/4281271). A collection of older releases can be found at ESS-Dive (https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017).