As global trade increasingly depends on complex Global Value Chains, the cross-border exchange of goods entails transfers of embedded carbon emissions. In this study, we explore the environmental footprint of countries-sectors by leveraging on environmentally extended multi-regional input-output data. We construct both production-based and consumption-based networks of country-sector interactions, where nodes represent country-sectors and edges reflect input-output linkages, and associate to nodes a measure capturing sectors’ environmental impact through emissions of greenhouse gases. Within this framework, we(i) apply a Kaya decomposition to understand global and national emissions drivers; (ii) derive within country and sectoral indicators according to their contribution to carbon emissions; (iii) apply PageRank centrality to identify the most systemically relevant sectors in global emission; and (iv) introduce national impact indexes that capture the trade-off between production efficiency and systemic environmental impact. Our results indicate a declining systemic role in global emissions for advanced economies, while the rise of East Asian countries—most notably China—has been accompanied by an increasing centrality in the global emissions network. These findings suggest that environmental regulations should distin guish between consumption- and production-based emissions, targeting inefficient high-centrality sectors in countries like China and India, while advanced countries should focus on mitigating the environmental impact transmitted through their consumption by their input-output linkages.