Interactive tool · 2023
Compare Country Emissions
Put any two of the 51 tracked economies side by side, total greenhouse-gas emissions, emissions per person, and emissions per dollar of GDP, for 2023. The same country can look very different depending on which measure you use.
Data: EU EDGAR v8.0 (2024 release), 2023 data year, MtCO₂e (AR6 GWP100, excludes LULUCF). Per-capita and per-GDP figures are derived from population and GDP estimates. According to the EU EDGAR database, a handful of large economies dominate absolute totals while the per-capita and intensity rankings reorder the table entirely.
How to read this comparison
Total emissions answer "who emits the most" - they track the size of an economy and its energy mix, so large industrial countries dominate. Per person divides those totals by population, which reorders the table: small, energy-intensive economies often rank far higher per capita than the absolute leaders. Per $B of GDP (emissions intensity) shows how much greenhouse gas an economy emits for each dollar of output, a measure of how clean the economic activity is, where service-heavy and nuclear/renewable-powered economies score lower.
No single measure is "the right one." A fair comparison usually looks at all three: a country can be a top-five absolute emitter yet sit mid-table per person, or have low totals but high intensity.
Methodology & sources
Emissions come from the EU EDGAR v8.0 database (2024 release), reported as MtCO₂e using AR6 GWP-100 factors and excluding land use (LULUCF) for cross-country comparability. Population and GDP are the estimates carried in the PlainEmissions database for the same data year. Per-capita = total ÷ population; intensity = total ÷ GDP. See our methodology for the full pipeline.
Every figure on PlainEmissions is rendered directly from EDGAR (EU Joint Research Centre) emissions data, no number is typed in by an editor. Comparison figures are computed directly from EDGAR emissions data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.