Let’s now focus on the consumers of products driving deforestation. After we adjust for imports and exports, how much CO2 from deforestation is each country responsible for?

Rather than looking at total figures by country [if you’re interested, we have mapped them here] we have calculated the per capita footprint. This gives us an indication of the impact of the average person’s diet. Note that this only measures the emissions from tropical deforestation – it doesn’t include any other emissions from agricultural production, such as methane from livestock, or rice, or the use of fertilizers.

In the chart we see deforestation emissions per person, measured in tonnes of CO2 per year. For example, the average German generated half a tonne (510 kilograms) of CO2 per person from domestic and imported foods.

At the top of the list we see some of the major producer countries – Brazil and Indonesia. The fact that the per capita emissions after trade are very high means that a lot of their food products are consumed by people in Brazil and Indonesia. The diet of the average Brazilian creates 2.7 tonnes of CO2 from deforestation alone. That’s more than the country’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, which are around 2.2 tonnes per person.

But we also see that some countries which import a lot of food have high emissions. Luxembourg has the largest footprint at nearly three tonnes per person. Imported emissions are also high for Taiwan, Belgium and the Netherlands at around one tonne.