Carbon Emissions by Industry -
SQL Insight on Product-Level PCFs

🧭 Context & Challenge:

This project explored publicly available carbon footprint data published on nature.com, covering Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) from global companies across industries.

The challenge was to quantify and rank industry-level emissions, and to identify how many companies drive those emissions in the most recent year of available data.

The underlying data stemmed from lifecycle-based product emissions, stored in a normalized SQL table: product_emissions.

🧩 Objectives:

• Aggregate CO₂-equivalent emissions (PCF) across industries

• Count the number of reporting companies per industry

• Rank industries by total footprint to highlight key polluters

• Limit analysis to the most recent year available in the dataset

🛠️ Technical Approach (SQL):

• Extracted the latest reporting year using a subquery

• Filtered product_emissions by that year only

• Used SUM() and COUNT(DISTINCT company) grouped by industry_group

• Ordered results by total_industry_footprint descending

• Rounded outputs for reporting clarity

🔍 Strategic Learnings:

This project demonstrated how structured SQL analysis can produce compliance-grade sustainability insights, based entirely on publicly available data.

By grouping and aggregating PCFs by industry, I highlighted where environmental impact is concentrated – and which sectors may require closer regulatory or investor scrutiny.