How the Major Greenhouse-Gas Datasets Differ

Why four sources

Single-source emissions dashboards present national totals as if they were measured. They are not. Every published greenhouse-gas total is the output of a measurement-modeling-reporting chain whose assumptions differ across the four global sources described here (PlainEmissions currently ingests EDGAR; the other three are documented for context). UNFCCC national inventories are politically negotiated self-reports under IPCC reporting guidelines; EDGAR is a globally-consistent bottom-up model that applies the same emission factors to every country; Climate TRACE uses satellite measurements and machine-learning attribution at facility resolution; the World Bank Climate Knowledge Portal aggregates multiple feeds for macro indicators. None is wrong. All disagree on specific countries. The disagreement is the information.

2022 EDGAR substrate

This reconciliation page anchors on a fixed EDGAR v8.0 snapshot for 2022, not PlainEmissions's live current-year data (see the country and ranking pages for current totals). That snapshot holds 15,183.28 MtCO2e for the world's top emitter that year (China) and 46,258 MtCO2e total across the 51 countries in this baseline. The next reconciliation pages will overlay the Climate TRACE 2023 release and UNFCCC most-recent submissions on this substrate, surfacing the per-country divergence directly via comparison tables and chart overlays.

Reconciliation overlays (Climate TRACE, UNFCCC) extend this baseline.

Data from EU EDGAR v8.0 (2024)

Source: EU EDGAR (Joint Research Centre) As of 2024 release (2022 data year)

Source: EU EDGAR v8.0, Joint Research Centre, European Commission (2024). CC BY 4.0.

Gas-level distribution

The 2022 totals broken down by gas show the global mix, CO2 dominates, methane follows at a fraction reflecting its shorter atmospheric lifetime, nitrous oxide and the F-gases round out. The figures below use AR6 GWP100 weighting; the native-unit (megatonnes per gas) value is also retained for users who prefer non-CO2e accounting.

CO2 ≈ 75.3% globally; CH4 ≈ 17.1%; N2O ≈ 4.4% based on EDGAR v8.0.

Data from EU EDGAR v8.0 (2024)

Source: EU EDGAR (Joint Research Centre) As of 2024 release (2022 data year)

Gas	MtCO2e (2022)	Share
Carbon dioxide	34,828.18	75.3%
Methane	7,899.92	17.1%
Nitrous oxide	2,056.17	4.4%
Fluorinated gases	1,473.49	3.2%

Source: EU EDGAR v8.0 (2024). Query: SUM(value_mt_co2e) BY gas_code WHERE year=2022 AND source_code='EDGAR'.

How we present the data

PlainEmissions presents EDGAR cleanly: country codes are normalized to ISO 3166-1 alpha-3, EDGAR's IPCC-2006 source categories are folded into a single IPCC sector hierarchy, every gas is converted to CO₂-equivalent megatonnes using AR6 GWP100 multipliers (native units retained for transparency), and missing combinations are left missing rather than back-filled, so you see EDGAR's data as it actually is. We do not currently merge multiple sources into one figure; where the other datasets are mentioned, it is to explain how their methods differ.

For users who want to compare datasets directly, each publishes openly: EDGAR from the JRC, the UNFCCC inventories from unfccc.int, Climate TRACE from climatetrace.org, and the World Bank Climate Knowledge Portal. The methane research page works through the best-documented divergence, the satellite-vs-inventory fossil-methane gap, using EDGAR's figures alongside the IEA's published findings.

Methodology

The fact table emissions_records stores one row per (iso3, year, sector_code, gas_code) tuple, loaded from the official EU EDGAR v8.0 per-gas workbooks. Each row preserves EDGAR's value (no rounding, no normalization beyond CO₂e conversion) along with the native gas-quantity value and unit. Country and sector pages are then a single SQL GROUP BY away. The source_code column is retained so additional datasets could be added in future with their own marker, but only EDGAR is loaded today. For full pipeline detail see PlainEmissions methodology.

Limitations

Every figure here is EDGAR's, the genuine EDGAR v8.0 annual time series (1970–2023) by country, sector and gas, loaded from the official workbooks. EDGAR's main GHG dataset excludes LULUCF (land use), so these totals do too; EDGAR reports that sector separately because it carries the largest methodological uncertainty. The other datasets (UNFCCC, Climate TRACE, World Bank) are referenced and explained but not currently loaded into the database; the methodology page tracks the loaded EDGAR vintage.