Compare Your Carbon Footprint to Your Country’s Average

A tonnage means little on its own. Here is how Decarbonr puts yours in context.

🌎 “Is that a lot?”

It is the first question anyone asks after seeing their own carbon footprint, and a single number cannot answer it. Six tonnes a year could be well below where you live or well above it. The useful answer needs two reference points: what people around you typically emit, and what a climate-safe level actually looks like. Decarbonr shows you both, and keeps showing them as your own number changes.

Two benchmarks, not one

Your national average tells you where you stand relative to the infrastructure, climate and habits you share with the people around you. National averages vary widely around the world, largely because of differences in energy systems, housing, transport and diet — so comparing yourself to a global figure, or to another country’s, can be misleading in either direction.

The sustainable target tells you where the number needs to go. Decarbonr uses 2 tonnes of CO₂e per person per year — about 5.48 kg a day — as the level aligned with limiting warming to 1.5°C, per the IPCC. Being below your country’s average is good news; it is not the same as being on target. Seeing both at once keeps that distinction honest.

What you see in the app

Comparison in Decarbonr is not a one-off quiz result. It sits on top of the things you actually log.

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National averages worldwide

Compare your footprint against national averages from around the world, so “high” and “low” mean something specific to where you live.

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The 2-tonne goal, made visible

A progress ring moves from red, through amber, to emerald as your annual emissions approach the Paris-aligned 2-tonne target.

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“What if everyone lived like you?”

Decarbonr translates your habits into a temperature: the warming the world would reach by 2050 if everyone emitted what you do.

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Country-specific tips

Personalized reduction tips are tailored to your country, and home electricity and heating use country-specific grid factors rather than a single global number.

Where the gap actually comes from

Knowing you are above or below average is only a starting point. The reason to track rather than calculate once is to see which part of your life creates the gap. Decarbonr breaks your footprint into the pieces you log:

Food — log what you eat, scan a barcode to pull product data from OpenFoodFacts (2.9M+ products), or use the optional AI add-on to estimate a meal’s footprint from a photo, ingredient by ingredient.
Travel — nine transport modes with per-kilometre emission factors from the European Environment Agency and the IPCC, with distances auto-calculated from city pairs.
Everything else — 12+ lifestyle categories including heating, electricity, water, waste and digital, each colour-coded by impact so the large ones stand out.

The category driving the difference from your national average is not always the one you would guess. That is the point at which a benchmark becomes useful — when it tells you where to look.

Comparison that stays private

Comparing yourself to others does not require sharing anything with them. There is no account to create and nothing synced to a server: your logs and your footprint are stored on your iPhone.

To keep the comparison moving in the right direction, the app adds goals, streaks and achievements, plus a built-in climate library of timelines, explainers, calculators, country data and quizzes. Decarbonr is available in 90+ languages on iOS 17.6 and later, as a subscription with a free trial.

Find out where you stand

Start with a free trial. No account, no ads, and nothing leaves your device.

General information only. Footprint estimates are based on the emission factors described on our research page and are approximations, not audited measurements.