Carbon footprint converter
Convert a carbon figure into things you can picture: kilometers driven, units of electricity, or trees for a year.
That's 3.7× as much as a kilogram of beef, while a short-haul flight is 2.5× more. That is about 2.128% of one person’s average yearly footprint.
What it means
What does that look like?
Equivalents use global averages: 170 g/km for a car, 350 g/kWh for a mixed grid, 21 kg a year for a mature tree. Your local figures may differ by a factor of two.
Every unit
Your footprint in every unit
Learn
Three things worth knowing
-
A tree absorbs 21 kg a year
So a tonne of CO₂ needs about 48 tree-years to absorb. Planting is slow arithmetic compared with not emitting.
-
Why "equivalent"
Comparing gases needs a common currency, so each is scored by its warming effect over a hundred years relative to CO₂. That score is the global warming potential.
-
Averages hide a lot
A kilowatt-hour is 20 g of CO₂ in France and over 700 in some coal-heavy grids. The same conversion can be wrong by a factor of thirty.
Shortcuts
Popular footprint conversions
Background
About CO₂ equivalents
Different gases warm the planet by different amounts, so everything is converted into the mass of carbon dioxide that would do the same job: CO₂ equivalent. Methane counts 28 times its weight, nitrous oxide 265.
The world average footprint is about 4.7 tonnes per person per year, and a single long-haul return flight can be a quarter of that.