Global carbon dioxide emissions reached 10,287 metric megatons of carbon in 2022, an increase of 2.72% over 2021 and 2.30% over 2019, according to the latest update of the CDIAC-FF annual dataset, which now extends its continuous record of fossil-fuel emissions from 1750 through 2022. The update, described in the journal Carbon Research, also introduces revised methods and, for the first time in this product, detailed emissions estimates by economic sector for every country back to 1995.
The CDIAC-FF dataset originated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1984, when the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center project began producing annual estimates of the magnitude and national origins of carbon dioxide emissions. Responsibility for the inventories migrated to Appalachian State University in 2019, where the work continues under the CDIAC-FF label. The dataset covers all carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use, natural gas flaring and venting, and cement manufacture, the largest non-energy industrial source of the gas. Its defining feature is consistency: the same accounting system boundaries are applied across all countries and all years since the beginning of the industrial era, which makes comparisons among countries and evaluations of change over time possible in a way that shorter or shifting records cannot match.
The estimates are built on what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls the reference approach. Because carbon dioxide emissions are seldom measured directly, they are calculated from the quantity and chemistry of fuels consumed. National fuel use is estimated as domestic production plus imports, minus exports, changes in stocks, and fuels loaded for international commerce. The fuel amount is then multiplied by the carbon content of each fuel type and by the fraction of carbon actually oxidized during use. For years from 1950 to the present, the primary data come from the United Nations Statistics Division; earlier values draw on historical energy statistics compiled by Etemad and colleagues and summarized in earlier CDIAC work. Emissions from international shipping and aviation bunker fuels are included in global totals but not attributed to any single country.
The most significant methodological change in this update concerns non-energy uses of liquid fossil fuels, such as solvents, lubricants, paraffin waxes, asphalt, and petrochemical feedstocks. Determining how much carbon in these products is stored long term versus oxidized to carbon dioxide is difficult and country-specific. The revised calculation now applies storage factors derived by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for years from 1990 onward, while prescribing storage as 6.7% of all liquid fuel use for earlier years, following the original 1984 approach. For global-mean values, the change reduces the fraction of carbon emitted from non-energy uses after 1990. National estimates shift slightly in both directions depending on the fuel mix of each country; in the United States, a country with relatively high non-energy usage of liquid fuels, the change produces a 2% reduction in estimated emissions. Other refinements, including small corrections for biofuels blended into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, updated conversion values for solid fuels, and minor cement data updates, alter total national emissions by no more than 0.2% in any year since 1751.
Uncertainty remains an inherent feature of such estimates. Multiple global emissions datasets, including those from the International Energy Agency, EDGAR, and the Community Emissions Data System, agree with each other on global total emissions within about 5% when accounting boundaries are harmonized, and estimates for most countries fall within plus or minus 10%. One published analysis derives an uncertainty of 8.4% at two sigma for the global total in recent years, a range shown as dashed lines around the dataset’s global curve. That global uncertainty is dominated by the variance in estimates for just five countries: China, the United States, India, Russia, and Mexico. National uncertainties vary widely, and the input data do not support a formal uncertainty estimate for individual countries. Annual revisions of the underlying UN energy data, examined across eleven successive dataset versions, have been found to be numerous but generally small, with little impact on emissions estimates beyond the first reporting year.
The 2022 totals confirm that global emissions continue to rise, driven primarily by increased combustion in China, India, and Indonesia, while emissions from other large emitters have slowed or, in some countries, decreased. Over the decade from 2013 to 2022, the dataset highlights growth in China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, alongside small or negative growth in the United States, Japan, Germany, and the Republic of Korea. Emissions from solid fuels, the most carbon-intensive fuel group, and global per capita emissions had largely stopped growing over the past decade, although solid fuel emissions did rise from 2020 to 2022. Per capita emissions in 2022 ranged enormously, from 9.711 metric tons of carbon per person per year in Qatar to 0.015 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The pandemic period offers a natural test of the dataset. Earlier studies based on preliminary or proxy data estimated that global emissions fell between roughly 4% and 7% in 2020 relative to 2019, with one preliminary estimate of 6.3%. The complete-data estimate in this update puts the 2020 decline at 4.64% below 2019. When 2020 emissions are compared against the mean of the surrounding years, the clearest drop appears in the aviation category, with domestic aviation showing particularly sharp reductions, while household and non-energy use sectors remained approximately normal. Most nations returned to pre-pandemic emission values by the following year, and both domestic and bunkered aviation peaked in 2019 and had not regained those highs as of 2022.
The new sectoral data, enabled by expanding UN records of final energy consumption, reveal where the emissions actually come from. Electricity and heat plants accounted for 39.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2022, making it the largest sector, followed by manufacturing, construction and non-fuel industry at 16.9%, and road transport at 14.5% — together, electricity and road transport alone produced fully half of global emissions. Between 1995 and 2022, emissions grew in nearly every sector: the electricity and heat sector added 1,789 megatons of carbon, an 82% increase, manufacturing grew by 602 megatons or 54%, and road transport by 493 megatons or 50%. In relative terms, cement and non-energy categories each grew 149%. Agriculture emissions remained relatively constant and rail transport emissions decreased, while energy industry own use peaked in 2012 and has declined since.
National sectoral profiles differ so markedly that reduction strategies cannot be uniform. Road transport contributed 29.1% of emissions in the United States in 2022 but only 4.0% in India, which had a much higher contribution from construction. China and South Africa are dominated by solid fuels, while Saudi Arabia and Iraq use essentially none because of large domestic oil production. The dataset also captures historical ruptures: emissions fell following the division of Germany in 1945, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. Soviet emissions peaked several years before dissolution, declining from 1988 to 1998, with cement emissions in the late 1990s falling to less than 30% of late-1980s highs. The full dataset is publicly available through FigShare and Appalachian State University, providing the consistent, long-view record its authors describe as central to understanding past emission trends and the potential avenues for reductions in the future.
Subject of Research: An updated annual dataset quantifying global and national carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, flaring, and cement from 1750 to 2022
Article Title: Global carbon dioxide emissions from 1750 to 2022: the CDIAC-FF annual product
Article References: Erb, M., & Marland, G. (2026). Global carbon dioxide emissions from 1750 to 2022: the CDIAC-FF annual product. Carbon Research, 5(1), Article 65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44246-026-00304-1
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s44246-026-00304-1
Keywords: carbon dioxide emissions, CDIAC-FF, fossil fuels, cement production, economic sectors, electricity and heat generation, COVID-19 pandemic, United Nations energy statistics, national emissions inventories, Global Carbon Project, uncertainty, Soviet Union
News Source: Sloane Callahan. (October 28, 2026). New dataset tracks 272 years of global carbon dioxide emissions to 2022. Scienmag.
