An open access web application for visualizing the carbon footprint of countries and regions using Sankey diagrams

A consumption-based carbon assessment is fundamental to assessing responsibility for climate change. However, the results vary widely depending on the chosen cut-off, making them difficult to understand for non-expert readers and hindering their adoption by policy makers. Sankey diagrams are a type of flow diagram where the thickness of the flow is proportional to its value. They make it possible to shed light on the different ways of calculating the carbon footprint and the consequences of choosing one method over another. Although several multi-regional input-output databases allow the calculation of footprints, none of them have been systematically represented as Sankey diagrams. To fill this gap, we are creating an open-access web application that presents the carbon footprint for 49 world regions from 1995 to 2019 based on EXIOBASE 3 data. (Baptiste Andrieu, Hugo Le Boulzec, Konstantin Stadle, more at nature.com)