Household carbon footprint calculator

Understanding your household carbon footprint

A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions generated by your activities over a year, measured in CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e). For most households, the biggest contributors are home energy, transport, and diet. The average American household produces around 48 metric tons of CO₂e per year, which is nearly double the global average.

Where your emissions come from matters as much as the total. A household that drives a large truck and heats with oil has a very different profile from one with an EV and solar panels, even if their incomes look similar. The calculator breaks your footprint into its component parts so you can see where the real opportunities are.

The results include a rewilding equivalent: how many native trees growing for one year would be needed to sequester your annual emissions. This is not a licence to offset rather than reduce. Nature-based carbon sequestration is genuinely powerful, but it cannot compensate for ongoing emissions at current scale. It is a way of connecting your personal footprint to the ecological restoration this site covers. The ecosystems that store carbon most efficiently, old-growth forests, peatlands, coastal wetlands, are the same ones rewilding seeks to protect. See our guide to carbon sequestration for more.