Working with factors

These pages show you how to use factor search and the factor pages to get a value you can defend: find it, read it, choose it, cite it, and take it away in a spreadsheet. None of them needs code.

Pick the page that matches the task in front of you:

• An activity and no factor yet: Find a factor.
• A page open and a value to understand: Read a factor page.
• Two candidates that both look right: Choosing between similar factors, which also covers spend factors and the price level.
• No idea which publisher to use: Choosing a library.
• The value chosen and the report to write: Cite a factor.
• Work to do in a spreadsheet: Export to a spreadsheet for the rows you filtered, or Download the open data for a whole library.
• A question about the data itself, rather than a task: see below.

Why not just use the publisher's own file#

A library published as a spreadsheet is usable on its own terms and hard to compare with the next one: its own category tree, its own region names, its own units, its own IPCC report, and a system boundary that is often implied rather than stated. Putting several libraries beside each other is most of the work of choosing a factor, and it is the work that was done here once so you do not repeat it per project.

• What was made comparable, theme by theme, with what it covers in each library: What open-climate.ai standardised.
• What exactly was changed on the way in, and how to read the publisher's own number back off the row: How factors are cleaned.
• The rules behind those changes, one page per convention: Methodology.

Nothing is guessed. A unit is rescaled only by a fixed ratio, a label is mapped to a controlled value only when the mapping is certain, and every change is recorded on the row it touched, so a reviewer can trace any served number back to the line the publisher printed.