Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Natural Fibres Composites (NFC) have lived since early 2000’s important progress due to the needs of reducing material consumption and weight in operating structures while limiting the environmental footprint and increasing the safety of such structures. Acoustic Emission (AE) is one of the numerous solutions that appears to be suitable to predict service life and assess damage in composite structures. NFCs have shown promising properties for structural applications but their complex behaviour and the limited knowledge on their long-term durability still hinder their full development. In that sense, AEbased SHM could allow a more important breakthrough of bio-based composites by monitoring damage evolution and assessing their remaining life in service conditions. The new generation of AE-sensors offers also opportunities of embedment thanks to their smaller size, leading to better protection of the sensors and increased sensitivity. We propose in this work to study the effect of the embedment of millimetric-size dummy sensors in flax/epoxy laminates on the monotonic tensile behaviour and damage kinetic up to failure through AE methods. Results highlight a limited effect of the presence of dummy sensors on the mechanical behaviour and properties. AE results coupled with X-ray tomography pictures however highlight a change in location of damages that are more likely to append in the insert vicinity, and in the onset of the most severe damages, which appears at lower global deformation levels.