Emission Factor Databases & Data Sources

Pick your data source

Need a factor for a specific job? Jump to the group that matches it — each links down to the sources it contains and what they are for. Not sure which applies? What each source covers walks through all fourteen.

What each source covers

The right factor source depends on three things: where the activity happens, what it is, and which standard you report under. These fourteen sit behind almost every number on the site.

Grid electricity & residual mixes

Grid factors change every year and by country, so the source and vintage matter more here than anywhere else. Ember Yearly Electricity Data is our default for location-based grid intensity worldwide — an open, annually refreshed dataset covering more than 200 countries. In the United States, EPA eGRID gives sub-region grid factors for Scope 2 reporting. For market-based Scope 2 in Europe, the AIB European Residual Mixes supply the residual-mix factor left after certificates are stripped out, and Green-e US Residual Mix does the same for the US. The IEA Global Energy Review 2026 provides the global energy and emissions context these grid figures sit within.

National & regional factor sets

National factor sets bundle fuels, transport, waste and grid into one government-maintained reference. UK DEFRA Emission Factors (2026) is the backbone for UK Scope 1 and 3 activity data — fuels, business travel, freight, waste and water — and the standard for SECR reporting. ADEME Base Carbone / Base Empreinte is the French equivalent, the reference for the Bilan Carbone method. Eurostat Environmental Accounts provide the EU-level air-emission accounts that underpin many spend-based and macro estimates.

Life-cycle inventory, embodied carbon & EPD databases

For products, materials and buildings you need cradle-to-gate life-cycle data, not activity factors. ecoinvent is the most widely used life-cycle inventory (LCI) database, covering thousands of processes across sectors and geographies. ÖKOBAUDAT is the German construction EPD database aligned to EN 15804, the reference for whole-life building carbon in Europe. The ICE Database (Inventory of Carbon & Energy) is the long-standing open source for embodied carbon coefficients of common materials. For sector-specific depth, the European Aluminium Environmental Profile gives primary and recycled aluminium LCA data, and IEA PVPS Task 12 provides the life-cycle inventory behind solar PV.

Food & agriculture

Food footprints vary enormously by product and production system. Poore & Nemecek (2018) is the landmark meta-analysis of global food life-cycle assessment — the most-cited source for per-kilogram food emissions and the basis for the food factors in our product and diet calculators. For land-sector activity data — enteric fermentation, manure, soils — the IPCC Tier-1 factors apply (see the data library below).

Which source powers which number

Most factor questions come down to matching a source to an activity and a geography. This is the mapping we use across the site.

Download the underlying data

Several of these sources are republished as open, citable datasets you can download directly — the same values our calculators read, with a fixed vintage and a DOI-style reference. The data library is the bridge between this directory and a spreadsheet you can work from.

How we use these sources

We do not maintain our own factors. Every value on GreenCalculus is read from one of the published sources above, through a single data layer that records which source, which vintage and which method each figure came from. When a source publishes an update — DEFRA’s annual UK factors, each year’s Ember grid intensities, a new eGRID release — the value changes in one place and every calculator that uses it moves together, with the change logged.

Greenhouse gases are converted to CO₂e using IPCC AR6 100-year global warming potentials, and the accounting method follows the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard. That means two numbers built from these sources are comparable: they share the same conversion basis and the same boundary rules, not just the same spreadsheet. You can inspect any factor, its source and its version in the MasterBrain data layer.