Annual personal CO₂e from transport, home and diet.
Reference: 2 t CO₂e/year is the per-capita target for a 1.5 °C-compatible 2050. The 2024 EU average sits near 7 t.
A personal carbon footprint estimate translates the abstract climate-change conversation into a single number you can compare against an actionable target. The IPCC's 1.5 °C-compatible per-capita target for 2050 is roughly 2 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per person per year. The 2024 European average sits near 7 t, the United States is closer to 16 t, India is around 2 t. Knowing where you fall on that distribution is the first step to deciding what changes — if any — would actually move the needle on your individual contribution. This calculator is intentionally a back-of-envelope estimate: it asks for the handful of high-leverage activities that dominate any individual's footprint (driving, flying, home energy, diet) and applies published emission factors to produce an annual total. It is not a replacement for a professional life-cycle assessment, but it is more than accurate enough to identify which lifestyle change would cut the most carbon — usually long-haul flights for those who take them, otherwise diet or transport.
A footprint is a sum of activity-times-factor products:
footprint (kg CO₂e/year) = Σ (activity_i × factor_i)
For each activity, the calculator multiplies your annual usage by an emission factor (kg CO₂-equivalent per unit) and sums across categories. The factors used here, rounded to two significant figures for honesty about precision, are: an average internal-combustion car at 0.18 kg CO₂e per km; short-haul flights at 250 kg per passenger-hour, long-haul at 180 kg per passenger-hour (long-haul is lower per hour because the climb-out fraction is smaller); residential electricity at 0.06 kg per kWh on the EU grid mix (this varies by country — France is closer to 0.05, Poland to 0.78); natural gas heating at 0.20 kg per kWh; and four diet archetypes ranging from 1000 kg/year (vegan) to 2700 kg/year (meat-heavy). Sources are drawn from public ADEME and IPCC ranges; numbers are rounded by intent, because false precision in carbon math is itself a kind of dishonesty.
The panel takes six inputs: annual car distance (km or miles), short-haul flight hours per year, long-haul flight hours per year, electricity consumption in kWh per year (look at your annual bill), heating gas in kWh per year, and a diet archetype dropdown. Defaults represent a moderate European urban dweller: 12 000 km of driving, 4 hours of short-haul flying, no long-haul, 3000 kWh of electricity, 8000 kWh of gas heating, mixed diet — totalling about 7 t CO₂e/year, very close to the EU average. The result panel shows your yearly footprint in tonnes, plus a stacked horizontal bar splitting transport / home / food so you can see at a glance which category dominates. Below that, the per-category breakdown is repeated in numeric form.
A young professional in Paris drives 8000 km/year, takes one round-trip to New York (12 hours of long-haul) and a Berlin weekend (2 hours of short-haul), uses 2400 kWh of electricity, and rents a small apartment with no individual gas heating (assume 0). Diet is vegetarian. Transport: 8000 × 0.18 + 2 × 250 + 12 × 180 = 1440 + 500 + 2160 = 4100 kg. Home: 2400 × 0.06 = 144 kg. Food: 1300 kg (vegetarian). Total: 5544 kg, or about 5.5 tonnes. The single 12-hour long-haul flight contributes 2160 kg — almost 40 % of the total — illustrating why aviation dominates any frequent flyer's footprint regardless of other lifestyle choices. By contrast, a retiree in rural Burgundy with 15 000 km of driving, no flights, 4000 kWh electricity, 12 000 kWh of gas heating, and a meat-heavy diet totals 2700 + 240 + 2400 + 2700 = 8040 kg or 8 t — driven mostly by heating and food rather than mobility.
First, confusing CO₂ and CO₂-equivalent. CO₂e accounts for methane and nitrous oxide, multiplied by their global-warming potential over 100 years. Methane from agriculture or leaks is 25-30 times worse per kg than CO₂; ignoring it understates farm and oil-and-gas footprints. Second, treating any single calculator's output as authoritative. Different calculators produce results 30-100 % apart for the same inputs because their underlying factor databases differ. The internal consistency of one calculator is more useful than the absolute value: use it to compare scenarios, not to publish a number. Third, leaving out the indirect footprint of consumption goods (electronics, clothing, food packaging, household appliances). Average European indirect emissions add 1-2 t/year on top of the direct activities asked about above. Fourth, double-counting by adding electricity emissions for an electric car where the driving distance is also entered with the ICE-car factor. Fifth, treating a low number as a success — even a 5 t footprint is more than twice the 2050 target, and meaningful collective change requires structural shifts (grids, transport networks) beyond individual optimisation.
National official inventories use a "production-based" accounting that attributes emissions to where goods are made, not where they are consumed. A "consumption-based" footprint adds the embedded emissions of imports and subtracts those of exports — for the United Kingdom, this shifts the per-capita number from about 5 t to about 8 t, mostly because manufacturing has been offshored to China. The carbon budget approach, championed by the IPCC, frames the problem as a finite stock: humanity can emit roughly 250 Gt more CO₂ before crossing 1.5 °C with 50 % probability, which at current rates is about six years of global emissions. Per-capita budgets are computed by dividing the remaining global stock by the world population and the years to net zero. Several countries — the UK, France, Germany — have set legally binding net-zero targets for 2050, which implies a halving of per-capita footprints by 2030. The calculator above gives you a single snapshot; the more useful exercise is to model the impact of one specific lifestyle change (sell the car, switch heating, adopt a low-meat diet) and see how it shifts the bar.