TOP 10 Countries by CO₂ Emissions per Capita from Transport (2025)

by admin November 25, 2025 786 23 min read

Transport · CO₂ emissions · per capita intensity

Transport CO₂ emissions per person: a 2025 assessment based on the best available comparable data

Metric: transport CO₂ per capita Unit: t CO₂ per person per year Reference: 2024 used as proxy Status date: February 1, 2026

Key takeaways

As of February 1, 2026, there is no single, fully comparable and openly available official dataset that covers all countries with verified annual CO₂ emissions for the transport sector specifically for the calendar year 2025 under one uniform definition of “transport”. The main reason is the reporting and validation lag between national inventories and harmonised international releases.

For cross-country ranking, the latest full year of globally comparable open data is used: 2024 (released as part of a 2025 publication update).
Additional context is provided because operational monthly estimates indicate that transport emissions in 2025 showed moderate year-on-year increases in some months, but these are often published as year-to-date or preliminary updates rather than final annual country totals.
In the latest full year (2024), the highest transport CO₂ per capita values typically occur in very small countries and territories, as well as in large, highly motorised countries with intensive transport activity, reflecting a small-population denominator effect and or high fuel and transport intensity.

Data sources and the definition of transport emissions

For academically robust work, priority is typically given to the International Energy Agency, national greenhouse-gas inventories under the UN climate reporting framework, the World Bank for demographic and macro indicators, and national statistical and environmental agencies as primary sources. The practical challenge for a “all countries, 2025, transport, CO₂” request is comparability combined with publication lags.

For this reason, global country-to-country comparison for the transport sector is based on an open, harmonised dataset published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre within the EDGAR emissions database. It is positioned as an independent, methodologically consistent estimate across countries, aligned to emissions-inventory guidance.

To interpret sector boundaries, inventory guidelines from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provide the normative basis. In these frameworks, transport emissions are usually treated as subcategories of the energy sector, including road transport, aviation, shipping and rail, with specific rules for international bunker fuels in national reporting.

Why 2025 needs to be approximated

The dataset documentation indicates that annual series in the chosen harmonised release run through 2024 (updated in a 2025 publication), not through 2025.

In parallel, operational systems publish 2025 as year-to-date estimates with lags of months, but this is a different class of data and does not always meet the requirement of a complete, final 2025 annual total for all countries in one openly available package as of early 2026.

Methodology and reproducibility

Target metric: transport CO₂ emissions per person.

Computation scheme:

Annual transport CO₂ emissions (metric tonnes of CO₂ per year)
Population (persons)
Transport CO₂ per capita (t CO₂ per person per year)

The transport sector is taken as the aggregated “Transport” category in the dataset (a unified methodology and consistent definitions across countries). To maintain internal consistency and avoid mismatched population definitions across sources, the population used in the ranking is the dataset’s internally aligned estimate implied by the relationship between total emissions and per-capita emissions. This improves comparability within the table, but it is a compromise relative to using an external 2025 mid-year population series, which is discussed in the limitations section.

Results and ranking

The Top 10 below ranks economies by transport CO₂ emissions per person using the latest full year of globally comparable open data (2024), treated as the most rigorous empirical anchor for a “2025 assessment” at the time of writing. Units are metric tonnes of CO₂ for emissions and tonnes of CO₂ per person for the per-capita indicator. The transport sector follows the dataset’s aggregated “Transport” category, and population is internally aligned within the same dataset, as described in the methodology.

Table. Top 10 economies by transport CO₂ emissions per capita, latest comparable year

Emissions are shown as annual transport CO₂ (t per year). Population is the dataset-aligned estimate implied by the internal relationship between total and per-capita emissions. Per-capita values are in t CO₂ per person per year.

Rank	Economy	Transport CO₂, t per year	Population, persons	Transport CO₂ per capita, t per person
1	Palau	772,652	23,000	33.594
2	Gibraltar	530,383	35,000	15.154
3	Curaçao	1,210,432	167,000	7.248
4	Luxembourg	4,315,799	634,000	6.807
5	Seychelles	515,760	98,000	5.263
6	United States	1,678,562,055	340,895,000	4.924
7	Qatar	13,020,705	2,984,000	4.364
8	Canada	166,299,204	38,868,000	4.279
9	Kuwait	19,030,646	4,545,000	4.187
10	New Caledonia	1,236,013	301,000	4.106

Units: emissions are in metric tonnes of CO₂. Per-capita values are in t CO₂ per person per year. The table uses the dataset’s aggregated “Transport” sector and an internally consistent population estimate aligned to the same dataset.

Why these economies rank so high

Interpretation in per-capita rankings must be cautious: “per person” reflects both real transport energy and carbon intensity and a population scale effect. The most likely mechanisms follow directly from standard inventory logic and the way transport-sector emissions are defined and allocated.

For very small countries and territories, even moderate absolute transport emissions can translate into extremely high per-capita values. This is a classic small-denominator effect when a territory has air connections, tourism and service transport, port infrastructure and similar activity.
The transport sector usually aggregates multiple modes, including road, aviation, shipping and rail. Territories with intensive passenger and freight flows, aviation and maritime logistics, and a high share of energy-intensive transport can therefore appear among the leaders.
Among large countries, high values more often align with a combination of factors:
- High motorisation and long travel distances (settlement patterns, commuting, logistics)
- High reliance on road freight and heavy-duty transport
- Fuel structure dominated by petroleum products in transport
- Economic structure that supports long transport “distances to market” and large internal freight flows

Context relative to 2020 and 2023

Although the request is framed around 2025, it is useful to check whether transport CO₂ per capita for the leader group has been changing in recent years. In the latest full year, the group-average value in 2024 is not lower than in 2023, and relative to 2020 an increase is more common. This pattern is consistent with the post-pandemic recovery of transport activity and the broader normalisation of mobility after the 2020 shock.

Monthly operational estimates provide an additional signal for 2025: one 2025 release reported year-on-year increases in transport emissions, expressed in CO₂-equivalent, for the corresponding month. This suggests that the order of magnitude and the composition of the leaders in transport carbon intensity per person are likely to remain broadly similar over a one-year horizon in the absence of a shock comparable to 2020.

Limitations and uncertainties

The main limitation is the year 2025. At the time of writing, the globally comparable annual dataset used for ranking contains series through 2024. This means that a strict “Top 10 for 2025” based on a finalised calendar year for all countries from one single source is replaced here by “Top 10 for the latest full year as the best empirical anchor for a 2025 assessment”.

A second limitation is population for 2025. Ideally, the population column would be taken from a single demographic source such as the United Nations or the World Bank for the year 2025. Because this run of calculations is designed to stay within one internally consistent dataset for all economies, population is reconstructed as the implied quantity behind the ratio “total emissions divided by per-capita emissions”. This ensures internal consistency, but it may differ from official mid-year 2025 population estimates and should not be interpreted as demographic statistics in its own right.

A third limitation concerns transport-sector boundaries. Even with international guidance, different systems can treat international transport, bunker fuels and the split between domestic and international activity differently. As a result, small territories with distinctive transport and fuel profiles can show values that should be read as “high carbon intensity of transport activity allocated to the territory under the rules of the dataset”, rather than as a direct footprint of resident households.

Finally, any all-country emissions database necessarily includes methodological assumptions and harmonisation of underlying inputs. This is especially relevant when comparing very small territories and large economies on the same per-capita scale.

Sources used

EDGAR report and documentation (country and sector emissions, including fossil CO₂ by sector)
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
IPCC inventory guidance for sector definitions and accounting boundaries
Used as the normative basis for interpreting what is included in “transport” and how fuels and modes are treated.
Climate TRACE data portal (operational and preliminary updates, including 2025 as year-to-date in public releases)
https://www.climatetrace.org/data
Climate TRACE monthly release for trend context (example: May 2025 emissions data release)
https://climatetrace.org/news/climate-trace-releases-may-2025-emissions-data
World Bank population indicator (reference for what a unified external population series looks like)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

The ranking itself is computed using the harmonised transport-sector series described above and is presented as an analytical comparison rather than an official country inventory publication.