How to calculate your carbon footprint (for Indian households)
A step-by-step method for Indian households: multiply what you use (electricity units, LPG, fuel, flights, food) by a sourced emission factor, add it up, and understand how uncertain the answer is.
What do you need before you start?
Every carbon footprint calculation uses the same simple formula:
Emissions = activity data × emission factor
Activity data is how much you used: kWh of electricity, kilograms of LPG, litres of petrol, kilometres flown or kilograms of rice. An emission factor tells you how much greenhouse gas is released per unit of that activity.
Collect these for one full year:
- 12 months of electricity bills (units in kWh), or your annual total from the discom app
- Number of LPG refills, or PNG bills in SCM (standard cubic metres)
- Fuel receipts, or odometer readings for each car and two-wheeler
- Flight tickets (from and to cities, class of travel)
- A rough idea of how much milk, rice, wheat, pulses, eggs and meat your household buys
Some factors give only carbon dioxide (CO2). Others give CO2 equivalent (CO2e), which also counts methane and nitrous oxide. Keep a note of which one you use.
Sources: Central Electricity Authority, CO2 Baseline Database for the Indian Power Sector, User Guide Version 22.0 (August 2026); Central Electricity Authority, CO2 Baseline Database User Guide Version 21.0 (November 2025); Central Electricity Authority, CO2 Baseline Database User Guide Version 20.0 (December 2024); 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Volume 2 Energy, Chapter 1; 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Volume 5 Waste; India GHG Program (WRI India, CII, TERI), India Specific Road Transport Emission Factors, Version 1.0 (2015); Bharat Petroleum, Natural Gas Conversions (reproducing PPAC conversion basis); ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator and methodology; Our World in Data, Which form of transport has the smallest carbon footprint? (UK DESNZ 2022 conversion factors); Our World in Data, Greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food product (Poore and Nemecek 2018, Science); Our World in Data, You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local; Our World in Data, CO2 emissions per capita (Global Carbon Budget)
This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked by the GreenEye team against the sources shown in each section.
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