What are the Yearly Total Human-Induced 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 gases.

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 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence, Piers M. Forster et al.
Credits: Credits: Smith, C., Walsh, T., Gillett, N., Hall, B., Hauser, M., Krummel, P., Lamb, W., Lamboll, R., Lan, X., Muhle, J., Palmer, M., Ribes, A., Schumacher, D., Seneviratne, S., Trewin, B., von Schuckmann, K., & Forster, P. (2024). ClimateIndicator/data: Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023 revision (v2024.05.29a) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8000192Update cycle: yearlyDelay: mixed

Global Carbon Budget 2024 Global Carbon Budget
Credits: Friedlingstein et al., 2024, ESSDUpdate cycle: yearlyDelay: ~ 10 months after end of a year. Current year values estimates published in November.Reference: Friedlingstein, P., O'Sullivan, M., Jones, M. W., Andrew, R. M., Hauck, J., Landschützer, P., Le Quéré, C., Li, H., Luijkx, I. T., Olsen, A., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Sitch, S., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Alin, S. R., Arneth, A., Arora, V., Bates, N. R., Becker, M., Bellouin, N., Berghoff, C. F., Bittig, H. C., Bopp, L., Cadule, P., Campbell, K., Chamberlain, M. A., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Colligan, T., Decayeux, J., Djeutchouang, L., Dou, X., Duran Rojas, C., Enyo, K., Evans, W., Fay, A., Feely, R. A., Ford, D. J., Foster, A., Gasser, T., Gehlen, M., Gkritzalis, T., Grassi, G., Gregor, L., Gruber, N., Gürses, Ö., Harris, I., Hefner, M., Heinke, J., Hurtt, G. C., Iida, Y., Ilyina, T., Jacobson, A. R., Jain, A., Jarníková, T., Jersild, A., Jiang, F., Jin, Z., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Klein Goldewijk, K., Knauer, J., Korsbakken, J. I., Lauvset, S. K., Lefèvre, N., Liu, Z., Liu, J., Ma, L., Maksyutov, S., Marland, G., Mayot, N., McGuire, P., Metzl, N., Monacci, N. M., Morgan, E. J., Nakaoka, S.-I., Neill, C., Niwa, Y., Nützel, T., Olivier, L., Ono, T., Palmer, P. I., Pierrot, D., Qin, Z., Resplandy, L., Roobaert, A., Rosan, T. M., Rödenbeck, C., Schwinger, J., Smallman, T. L., Smith, S., Sospedra-Alfonso, R., Steinhoff, T., Sun, Q., Sutton, A. J., Séférian, R., Takao, S., Tatebe, H., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Torres, O., Tourigny, E., Tsujino, H., Tubiello, F., van der Werf, G., Wanninkhof, R., Wang, X., Yang, D., Yang, X., Yu, Z., Yuan, W., Yue, X., Zaehle, S., Zeng, N., and Zeng, J.: Global Carbon Budget 2024, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-519, in review, 2024.