Cement CO2 Emissions Time Series: Which Datasets Actually Publish One

1. Global CO2 Emissions from Cement Production (GCP-CEM) — annual process CO2 in ktCO2 per country, 1880–2025 across 214 countries and territories, every data point attributed to its source in companion files. Datadory scores it 9 of 10.
2. Monthly Global Cement Production Data (CICERO) — 175 collated monthly cement and clinker series, the physical activity data needed for sub-annual emission estimation.
3. Global Database of Cement Production Assets and Upstream Suppliers — geolocated plants with wet/dry process flags, the variable that drives kiln-level emission intensity.
4. Global Cement and Concrete Tracker — 3,884 plants across 171 countries and areas with emissions-reduction technology fields, released July 2026.

GCP-CEM is the continuation of Andrew (2019), 'Global CO2 emissions from cement production, 1928–2018', published in Earth System Science Data 11, 1675–1710, maintained by Robbie M. Andrew of CICERO for the Global Carbon Project. The May 2026 release — version 260526 — covers 1880 through 2025 and incorporates 2026 Annex 1 UNFCCC reports plus new Biennial Transparency Reports. The core CSV is 128.8 kB: ISO code, UN code, country name, then one column per year. Nine supporting files bring the deposit to roughly 2.5 MB.

The derivation chain differs by country class, and the sources file makes it inspectable rather than hidden. For UNFCCC Annex I parties, emissions come directly from official submissions — their clinker series derive from CRT reporting. Country-specific methods apply to Brazil, India, South Africa, Thailand, USA and Vietnam, each documented in the country_specific.zip workbooks (China back to 1949, including monthly NBS series). Remaining non-Annex I countries are estimated with GNR clinker ratios and IPCC default factors, while China and Argentina use officially reported factors. Former Soviet states are disaggregated before dissolution, so Russian and central European series run continuously instead of breaking at 1991. Every cell carries a provenance code — Official, Interpolated or CRT — in the *_sources.csv files, and blank cells mean NODATA, never zero.

The 2025 observations make the scale concrete. Process emissions from carbonate decomposition reached about 1.5 Gt CO2 globally in 2025, while fossil-fuel combustion at cement plants contributed roughly another 0.9 Gt CO2 — deliberately excluded from GCP-CEM because it already sits inside global fossil-CO2 datasets, which is why the two categories must never be added together naively. Country rows show the divergence between mature and growing markets: China's process CO2 falls from 634,900 kt in 2024 to 587,300 kt in 2025, while India moves the other way, from 185,500 kt to 204,400 kt. At the small end of the same table, Afghanistan registers 84.99 kt and Albania 1,264 kt for 2025 — a reminder that the series spans four orders of magnitude within one file. The companion annual_cement_production.csv puts China at 1,830,000 thousand tonnes of cement in 2024 against India's 438,727.5 and the USA's 86,000. Because GCP-CEM feeds the Global Carbon Budget, the Energy Institute Statistical Review, PRIMAP-hist and CEDS, numbers computed here reconcile with the headline inventories those publications cite.

Not directly — no publisher releases monthly CO2, because emission factors are computed from annual clinker chemistry and UNFCCC reporting runs yearly. The accepted workaround is activity-data substitution: take monthly clinker tonnage and apply a factor. That is exactly what Monthly Global Cement Production Data (CICERO) enables, as the monthly companion to Andrew's own emissions record.

Emission inventories stop at the border, but decarbonization work rarely does. To attribute a share of that 1.5 Gt to specific operators, two asset databases bridge the gap. The Global Database of Cement Production Assets and Upstream Suppliers, published on Dryad by the Spatial Finance Initiative at Oxford under commercial delivery terms with no attribution condition, carries capacity in millions of tonnes with a confidence rating and cited source, plant type (integrated versus grinding), wet versus dry process, production start year, and ownership chains holding Refinitiv PermIDs and Legal Entity Identifiers for up to two ultimate parents — plus ticker and exchange for listed ones. Its suppliers file attributes each plant to upstream mine suppliers by country with coordinates, the only such linkage available for cement. Both files are small (1.01 MB and 2.15 MB), but the deposit has been static since version 7 in October 2023, so treat it as structural context rather than current capacity.

For freshness, the Global Cement and Concrete Tracker, July 2026 release from Global Energy Monitor, covers 3,884 cement and clinker plants across 171 countries and areas — roughly 6.1 billion tonnes of annual cement capacity and 3.7 billion tonnes of clinker capacity — and includes an emissions-reduction technologies field documenting green-cement strategies in use or planned per plant, alongside wet/dry/semidry production type. Access is free under commercial delivery terms 4.0 via a form requiring name, email, organization and a use-case description of at least 100 characters; summary tables by country and region are readable as public Google Sheets without the form. Pairing the two answers the question neither can alone: which operators hold the kilns that dominate the national series.

Process-emission series measure what kilns release today; embodied-carbon studies ask what materials already standing in buildings represent. Building Material Stocks and Embodied Carbon — Two Chinese Urban Agglomerations quantifies both for 38 cities in the Yangtze River Delta and Greater Bay Area from 2000 to 2020, spanning eleven materials including cement and lime across 132,931,068 records in twenty-six xlsx tables. City-level sheets hold 8,778 records each for total stocks and total cradle-to-gate embodied carbon; gridded tables run 5,538,063 records per material at 500x500 m resolution. Emission factors come from China's Standard for Building Carbon Emission Calculation (GB/T 51366-2019), with residential steel intensity at 40 kg/m2 and non-residential at 80 kg/m2. The figshare data items carry commercial delivery terms 4.0, though the accompanying article text is commercial delivery terms-NC-ND 4.0 — cite accordingly if you republish figures.