Carbon Footprint

The carbon footprint is a measure of the total amount of greenhouse gases produced to directly and indirectly support human activities, usually expressed in equivalent tons of carbon dioxide (CO2).

The carbon footprint is a subset of the ecological footprint and of the more comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). An individual, nation, or organization’s carbon footprint can be measured by undertaking a GHG emissions assessment or other calculative activities denoted as carbon accounting.

The data is sourced from the greenhouse gas emissions per capita indicator of the OECD’s How’s Life? well-being database (dataset DSD_HSL@DF_HSL_FWB, indicator 12_9), so the figures are expressed in tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person, on an annual basis.

This series currently ends in 2020, so a date range that starts after that returns an empty DataFrame and later years are absent rather than NaN.

Also known as: CO2 emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gas.

Carbon Footprint in Python

get_carbon_footprint is part of the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_carbon_footprint as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date="2010-01-01", end_date="2020-01-01")

economics.get_carbon_footprint(countries=['Germany', 'United States', 'Poland'])

Which returns:

Parameters

get_carbon_footprint accepts the following parameters:

• countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
• rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
• trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
• growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
• lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
• standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
• rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.

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