Consumption-based carbon footprint

What this indicator measures

Consumption-based emissions start with CO₂ produced within a country, subtract emissions embedded in exports and add emissions embedded in imports. Dividing by population produces an average in tonnes of CO₂ per person.

Why Humain Alert uses it

Territorial emissions can assign the pollution from an exported product only to the producing country. Trade adjustment moves that carbon toward the country where the product or service is consumed, making the measure closer to a national consumption footprint.

How it is displayed

The dashboard shows the latest raw value in tonnes per person together with the reference year and geographic coverage. It is not normalized or given an alert colour. The dashboard no longer calculates a combined score.

What it cannot prove

This is a national average, not an individual footprint. It covers fossil fuels and industry but excludes land-use change, deforestation, soils and vegetation. International aviation and shipping are included in the world total but are not allocated to individual countries. Some economies lack sufficient trade data.

Make the accounting boundary explicit

Worked example — invented values. Consider an invented economy with territorial emissions of 100 tonnes, 30 tonnes embodied in exports and 50 embodied in imports. Its consumption-based total is 100 − 30 + 50 = 120 tonnes. With ten residents, that is 12 tonnes per person. These deliberately small invented numbers show the arithmetic, not a real country.

The national average does not assign 12 tonnes to each actual person or identify which personal action would reduce it. Compare the same reference year and accounting boundary, and do not substitute all greenhouse gases for this CO₂ series. Carbon remains a separate physical measure; its unit should stay visible.

Humain Alert explanation · 13 September 2026. Source definitions are linked below; the example is not a new observation.

Source details

Dashboard examples

Further analysis

Our carbon-accounting explainer follows an imported product across national inventories and shows when consumption-based emissions answer a more useful question than territorial emissions. Consumption vs territorial carbon →