What are the Yearly Human-Induced Net CO₂ Emissions?

These are the total yearly CO₂ emissions emitted through human activities. They are the sum of CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and industry plus emissions from land-use, land-use change and forestry. In the scientific literature human-induced emissions are often referred to as anthropogenic emissions.

Human-induced CO₂ emissions are crucial because they are the largest driver of human-induced warming. Total CO₂ emissions are also crucial in relation to the remaining carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is based on CO₂ emissions alone and should not be related to the sum of CO₂-equivalent emissions from all gasses.

This indicator is specifically about net emissions, which means that it also accounts for the fact that certain human activities absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, for example afforestation and reforestation.

Units and measures

CO₂ emissions are expressed in the total weight in gigatonnes per year.

Insights from this chart

The long-term steady growth of yearly CO₂ emissions since the 1950s has flattened in the last 10 years, but yearly emissions are not yet clearly reducing. A steady yearly reduction is necessary to not exhaust the remaining carbon budget during the long-term transition towards less carbon-dependent human activities.

About the data

Climate Change Tracker is part of the Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) initiative to spread indicators of climate change that are consistent with the IPCC Assessment Report 6. The IGCC produces estimates for key climate indicators: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, surface temperature changes, the Earth’s energy imbalance, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes.

The IGCC CO₂ emissions data currently only contains Global Carbon Budget data since 1959. The historic data is taken from the Global Carbon Budget directly.

Data sources

IGCC Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022
Credits: Chris Smith, Tristram Walsh, Alex Borger, Piers Forster, Nathan Gillett, Mathias Hauser, Willam Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Matthew Palmer, Aurélien Ribes, Dominik Schumacher, Sonia Seneviratne, Blair Trewin, & Karina von Schuckmann. (2023). Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022 (v2023.06.02). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8000192Update cycle: yearlyDelay: mixed

Global Carbon Budget 2022 Global Carbon Project
Credits: Friedlingstein et al (2022) - full reference below **Update cycle: yearlyDelay: ~9 months after end of yearReference: ** Global Carbon Budget 2022, by Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Luke Gregor, Judith Hauck, Corinne Le Quéré, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Are Olsen, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Ramdane Alkama, Almut Arneth, Vivek K. Arora, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Henry C. Bittig, Laurent Bopp, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Margot Cronin, Wiley Evans, Stefanie Falk, Richard A. Feely, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Lucas Gloege, Giacomo Grassi, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Richard A. Houghton, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Atul K. Jain, Annika Jersild, Koji Kadono, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Peter Landschützer, Nathalie Lefèvre, Keith Lindsay, Junjie Liu, Zhu Liu, Gregg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Matthew J. McGrath, Nicolas Metzl, Natalie M. Monacci, David R. Munro, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Yosuke Niwa, Kevin O'Brien, Tsuneo Ono, Paul I. Palmer, Naiqing Pan, Denis Pierrot, Katie Pocock, Benjamin Poulter, Laure Resplandy, Eddy Robertson, Christian Rödenbeck, Carmen Rodriguez, Thais M. Rosan, Jörg Schwinger, Roland Séférian, Jamie D. Shutler, Ingunn Skjelvan, Tobias Steinhoff, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Shintaro Takao, Toste Tanhua, Pieter P. Tans, Xiangjun Tian, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Anthony P. Walker, Rik Wanninkhof, Chris Whitehead, Anna Willstrand Wranne, Rebecca Wright,Wenping Yuan, Chao Yue, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Jiye Zeng, and Bo Zheng (2022), Earth System Science Data, 14, 4811–4900, 2022, DOI: 10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022.