Carbon emissions from 1750-2023 - the CDIAC-FF project

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:</p><ul><li><b>global.1750-2023.xlsx</b>: Carbon emissions by fuel type from 1750-2023 for the globe</li><li><b>nation.1750-2023.xlsx</b>: Carbon emissions by fuel type from 1750-2023 for individual nations</li></ul><p dir="ltr">Two additional files contain the total and per capita emissions for the most recent year (2023).

These files are a subset of the data in “nation.1750-2023.xlsx,” and are presented separately for ease of use:</p><ul><li><b>total.2023.xlsx</b>: Total carbon emissions for each nation during 2023</li><li><b>per_capita.2023.xlsx</b>: Per capita carbon emissions for each nation during 2023</li></ul><p dir="ltr">The final file, “sectoral.1995-2023.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 1995-2023. 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:</p><ul><li><b>sectoral.1995-2023.xlsx</b>: Carbon emissions by sector from 1995-2023 for individual nations and regions</li></ul><p dir="ltr">A more complete description of the methods, data, and results will be presented in future papers.

The website <a href="scidata.appstate.edu/carbon/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">scidata.appstate.edu/carbon/</a> provides interactive charts to easily visualize much of the data in these files. Country codes in the data are the <a href="unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">UN M49 codes</a>. Country names come from the UN fuel dataset and do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors.</p><p dir="ltr">A previous version of this dataset was described in <a href="doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-1667-2021" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Gilfillan & Marland (2021)</a>, with that dataset archived at Zenodo (<a href="zenodo.org/records/4281271" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">zenodo.org/records/4281271</a>).

A collection of older releases can be found at ESS-Dive (<a href="data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017</a>).</p>