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Choosing a library

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Choose a library in four steps: start from the country where the activity happens, narrow by sector, match the kind of data you hold (a physical quantity or an amount of money), then check that the licence allows your use. Each step has a filter on the Libraries page.

A library is one publisher's dataset, served as the publisher published it, in one edition at a time. Libraries are added as they are imported, so this page gives you the method and names a few libraries as illustrations. The Libraries page is the current list; the filters in factor search are the current answer for your activity.

Read the library list#

Libraries shows one card per library, with the publisher's name and home region, the edition, a badge saying whether the licence is open, and how many factors, values and countries it serves, or regions for a library that is sub-national only. Five filters narrow the list: Kind, Scope, Tag, Region and Licence. Four of them match the steps below; Kind is the one that does not, and it is explained next.

Click a card to open the library's own page. It is one long page, and its tab row jumps to the parts: the overview, the open data and what was standardised, the coverage by category and by boundary, the factor list, and the licence with the credit line to copy. A library that has them also gets tabs for its Versions, its methodology, what we import, its known limitations and its changelog. Read Limitations before you rely on a library: it says what the library leaves out.

Versions is where you check that what you are reading is still the publisher's current edition, and when we last looked for a newer one. Editions and updates reads that section row by row and says what changes for you when an edition moves.

Who publishes it: the Kind filter#

Kind is the body behind the library. It is a closed list with one value per publisher, so a filter on it leaves nothing out.

Kind Who that is
Government A public authority publishing for its own jurisdiction, such as DESNZ for the UK or MITECO for Spain
Intergovernmental A body several states run together, publishing for all of them
Research A university, a public research institute or an academic consortium, such as EXIOBASE
Non-profit An association or foundation, often the sector's own, such as AIB for European electricity
Commercial A company, whose data can still be published openly, as Open CEDA's is

Use Kind for provenance: who stands behind the number, and what kind of terms to expect. Two misreadings to avoid. Kind is not a licence tier: a government library can still restrict what you republish, and a commercial one can be fully open, so read step 4 rather than the label. And it is not a quality ranking.

Step 1: the country#

Prefer the library published for the country where the activity happens. National publishers use national grid mixes, fuel specifications and transport fleets, so their values describe your site better than a regional average does.

Two ways to find it:

  • From the library side, filter Region on the Libraries page. It groups libraries by the continent their home region sits in, so pick the continent that contains your country.
  • From the activity side, search the activity in factor search and open the Region filter. That shows what actually exists for your country across every library at once, which is the answer you need.

A library's home region is where its publisher sits, not the only place it covers: ADEME Base Carbone is French and publishes values for Europe and for other countries. When no national library covers your activity, take the smallest area that contains it and say so, but check first that the code is not a rest-of-world region: those are defined by the countries they leave out, so one can exclude exactly the country you were looking for. See Regions and region.

Note. For spend data the country matters less. The spend libraries are built on world trade models and price most countries in one table. Step 3 covers them.

Step 2: the sector#

Some libraries cover everything; others go deep on one sector. When both exist for your activity, the specialist usually describes it more precisely, because it models the sector rather than tabulating it.

The Scope filter says which is which, and the verdict is measured rather than claimed: a library is a Generalist when at least four categories each hold at least 5% of its factors, and a Specialist when fewer than four do. A library can therefore spread across three categories and still be a Specialist: three of MITECO's categories clear that share, one short of the four a generalist needs. Specialist means concentrated, not small. The library page gives the measurement behind the label, naming the largest category and its share. Use Scope to tell a library that can carry a whole inventory from one that is a targeted supplement. The Tag filter is the faster route when you know the sector: Construction, Electricity, Food, Grid mix, LCI, Spend, Transport, Waste, and so on.

Illustrations of what a specialist looks like: every factor in AGRIBALYSE is in Food and agriculture; every factor in AIB is Electricity, published market-based; ÖKOBAUDAT is construction materials and products, mostly EPDs from named manufacturers; MITECO publishes Spanish electricity including named suppliers' values.

For electricity, read market-based vs location-based before you choose: the approach matters more than the publisher.

Step 3: activity data or spend data#

Look at what your data holds. This is the check that most often sends you to a different library.

  • A physical quantity (kWh, litres, tonnes, km): use an activity-based factor. Most libraries are activity-based.
  • An amount of money: use a spend-based factor. Among the public libraries, EXIOBASE, Open CEDA and USEEIO publish only spend factors, and ADEME Base Carbone has some; other libraries in factor search carry them too. In factor search, the Unit family filter set to Monetary finds them whatever the library.

Spend factors are coarser: they estimate emissions from what you paid, by sector. Use them for purchases you cannot measure physically, and move to activity data where the emissions are large.

Three things follow a spend factor around, and they differ by library: the price basis it divides by, the currency it is per, and the price level of that currency. A factor per yen is not a factor per euro, and a basic-price factor applied to invoice spend overstates the result. Spend factors and the price level sets out what to check, and spend-based vs activity-based explains why.

Step 4: the licence#

Using a factor for your own footprint is allowed by every library factor search serves, though a few answer Yes, if rather than Yes: the grant carries a condition, usually crediting the publisher. What differs more is what you may do afterwards: publish the results, hand the file to a customer, put the values in a product you sell, or modify and republish them.

Two places answer that, both kept current with the publisher's terms:

  • One library. Its Open data section ends with "What can I do with this data?". The Your rights card answers five questions with Yes, No, Yes, if and the conditions, or Unclear: ask and who holds the rights, then gives the credit line to copy. Download the open data reads the card line by line.
  • Every library at once. The Open data page lists them all with the same five answers on each card, and a filter What I need to do: tick "Share with my customers", "Put in a product I sell" or "Modify and republish" and the list keeps only the libraries that allow it. That is the fastest way to answer a licence question before you commit to a library.

The Licence filter sorts libraries into tiers. The two you meet most often:

  • Open: reuse the values on the publisher's conditions, which always include crediting the publisher and sometimes saying what you changed or implying no endorsement.
  • Copyleft: the same, plus share-alike. EXIOBASE and Open CEDA are both CC BY-SA 4.0, so what you share built on their values must carry the same licence. Read the card before you publish results or hand on a file.

The card reads the publisher's terms; it does not replace them. It says so, and its Full terms link opens the publisher's own text. See licence tier and licences.

Watch out. A library whose terms forbid redistribution is still listed, not hidden. Its activities stay searchable, its values show as withheld with a dagger (†), and it has no download. A withheld value is unknown, not zero, and it is left out of an export.

Mixing libraries#

You can use several libraries in one inventory: DESNZ for UK travel and ADEME for French heating, for example. Keep three things consistent across them:

  • The boundary: do not add a well-to-use value from one library to a combustion-only value from another as if they covered the same stages. See system boundaries.
  • The GWP version: use the AR6-normalised figures when you add lines from libraries that published on different versions. See GWP.
  • The choice for one activity type: use the same library for all your fuel lines, all your flights, and so on, so that a change in total is a change in activity, not in source.

Missing a library?#

The Libraries page has Ask for a new library.

Next#