What is a carbon footprint?
A plain guide to what a carbon footprint is, what it includes, how big the average Indian footprint is, and what the number can and cannot tell you.
Why is it measured in CO2 equivalent?
Carbon dioxide is not the only gas that traps heat. Methane (from cattle, rice fields and landfills) and nitrous oxide (from fertilisers) are also important, and they trap far more heat per kilogram than carbon dioxide. To add them together fairly, each gas is multiplied by its global warming potential (GWP), a number published by the IPCC that compares its warming effect with carbon dioxide over a chosen period, usually 100 years. The result is CO2 equivalent, written CO2e.
Our article on greenhouse gases and CO2 equivalent explains GWP values in detail.
Sources: IPCC AR6 Working Group III, Annex I: Glossary (2022); IPCC AR6 Working Group III, Summary for Policymakers (2022); Our World in Data, CO2 emissions per capita (Global Carbon Budget 2025); Our World in Data, India CO2 country profile; MoEFCC, India First Biennial Transparency Report (BTR-1) to the UNFCCC; MoEFCC, India Fourth Biennial Update Report (BUR-4), December 2024; 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Volume 2, Chapter 1; GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (Revised Edition); SEBI circular on Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting, May 2021; Central Electricity Authority, CO2 Baseline Database for the Indian Power Sector, User Guide Version 22.0 (August 2026)
This article was prepared with AI assistance and checked by the GreenEye team against the sources shown in each section.
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