Licences and redistribution of emission factors

Every factor comes under its publisher's licence, and the licence decides what you may do with the number: use it, publish results from it, pass it on, build it into a product. The data sorts each licence into one of four tiers and answers five plain questions about it. Most libraries here are open or copyleft, so you can use and redistribute their values as long as you credit the publisher and meet the licence's conditions. The rest are listed with their values withheld, because no right to republish the numbers has been established.

Note. This page explains how the data records licences. It is not legal advice. The publisher's own terms, linked from each library page, are what bind you.

The four tiers#

license_tier is set per library release:

A tier is decided per release, so a publisher that changes its terms changes the tier of its next release, not of the ones you already used. Filter factor search with license_tier, for example copyleft factors.

When a tier changes#

Because a tier belongs to a release, a change in the publisher's terms reaches you through the next release rather than through the ones you already used. What you see afterwards depends on which way it moved.

• Tightened to restricted. The activities stay searchable and their values are withheld rather than emptied: the value fields are absent from the payload, value_withheld says so, and the rows leave a file altogether. What that looks like where you read it is covered already: in an export and on the library page.
• Tightened to prohibited. The library leaves the served surface altogether. A slug that answered yesterday answers 404 with factor_not_found, which is the same answer as a slug that never existed, and a filter on that library returns nothing. This is the licence case where a published slug always resolves does not hold: the address is still correct, and the licence is what stops it being served. It is not the only case. The same 404 also answers a slug that resolves to nothing and a factor with no value row currently served, and the three are deliberately indistinguishable, so the answer never tells you which one you hit.
• Loosened to open or copyleft. Values are served where none were before, so a count you recorded earlier can rise without your query changing.

A library can also be withdrawn outright. Nothing pushes that to you: a library's own Changelog section is where its events are written up, no feed announces a licence change, and no field on a row says a library used to be here. A query simply comes back shorter than the last time you ran it.

So build the check rather than wait for a notice. Read license_tier from the rows you hold and compare it with what you stored, and filter on the tier rather than on the library name, which is the habit Keep only redistributable rows already recommends. Numbers you published earlier stay yours to keep if the licence you used at the time allowed it, which is the reason to pin the release beside the value.

Five questions per licence#

A tier is a summary. Each licence also answers five questions, shown on every library page under "What can I do with this data?":

1. Use it to calculate my own footprint.
2. Publish my footprint results.
3. Share the file with my customers.
4. Put the factors in a product I sell.
5. Modify it or combine it with my own data.

Each answer is yes, yes, if (with the conditions listed), ask (the terms reserve the right, and the page names who to ask), unclear (no written grant settles it) or no. The page also says how sure the answer is: a named licence such as CC BY, the publisher's published terms, a statute, written confirmation from the publisher, or open-climate.ai's own reading where no written grant settles it.

The libraries these docs use#

The libraries the examples in these docs are drawn from. It is not the whole of factor search: the Libraries page is the current list, and every library page carries its own licence, its conditions and how many factors it holds.

Every library in this table is served in full. A library whose terms grant no right to republish its values is served as metadata only, with each value withheld: see when there is no download.

Two libraries leave part of the answer open. For AIB, sharing the file with customers and embedding the factors in a product you sell are unclear: ask the Association of Issuing Bodies. For ÖKOBAUDAT, the same two uses and modifying or combining the data are unclear: ask the BBSR. Using the factors for your own footprint and publishing your results are granted for both, with credit.

What you may redistribute#

• Open. Pass the values on, in a report, a file or a product, as far as the five answers allow. Keep the credit line with them.
• Copyleft. The same, but what you distribute that contains the values, such as a spreadsheet of factors or a dataset built from them, must carry the same licence.
• Restricted. Cite the factor by its identifier and library, and obtain the value from the publisher under your own licence. If you already hold that licence, open-climate.ai can serve you the values.
• Prohibited. Nothing to redistribute.

A file that mixes libraries must meet every licence in it. One that combines EXIOBASE rows with DESNZ rows carries the share-alike condition for the EXIOBASE part and the no-endorsement condition for the DESNZ part.

Watch out. A licence covers the data, not the name. Crediting a publisher is required; suggesting that the publisher endorses your product or your figures is not. The Open Government Licence says so explicitly.

If you hold the publisher's licence#

Holding the publisher's own licence for a restricted library changes what open-climate.ai may serve you. The entitlement is recorded against your account for the restricted tier rather than for one library, so once it is granted factor search and the factor page return the values of every restricted library instead of withholding them, and you stop having to fetch every number from the publisher by hand.

It is not self-service, and no setting turns it on. Next to a withheld value factor search and the factor page offer Ask about withheld values: that is the route, and open-climate.ai records the entitlement once your licence is confirmed. Four limits are worth knowing before you build on it.

• Only restricted opens. A prohibited library never widens, for anyone. An open or copyleft library needs nothing.
• Only your own credential spends it. A signed-in session or a personal API key carries the entitlement. A partner key that names you as its subject does not: it is served the anonymous view, with the values withheld and no error saying why.
• Files are not widened. A spreadsheet export and a library download leave restricted rows out whoever asks, so a value you can now read on screen is still absent from the file.
• It grants no redistribution. The entitlement lets open-climate.ai show you the number. What you may then do with it is decided by the publisher's licence you hold, not by this one.

A change to an entitlement does not reach the served response instantly, so a call made straight after one is recorded can still come back withheld. Try it again shortly.

Crediting the publisher#

Every factor carries three fields for this:

• license_code: which licence applies.
• license_url: where to read it.
• attribution_text: the credit line to reproduce as written.

For DESNZ the credit line is "UK Government GHG Conversion Factors for Company Reporting 2026, DESNZ. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. © Crown copyright." For ADEME it is "Source ADEME, Base Carbone v23.6". An export from factor search carries license_code and attribution_text on every row, so the credit travels with the file.

Crediting open-climate.ai#

Those three fields are the publisher's half of the credit. The credit line shown on a library page adds a second half, because what open-climate.ai adds to a library (the normalised and added columns, the grouping into factors and parts, the file itself, and the estimated electricity legs, whose public inputs the export credits beside the publisher) is licensed under CC BY 4.0, or under CC BY-SA 4.0 over a copyleft library. The licence named in the final parenthesis of that line is that one, not the publisher's. The data terms sets it out in full, with the two conditions it carries: a working hyperlink on a website, and no implied endorsement by either party.

Related#

• licence-terms.xlsx: the four tiers and, per licence code, the five answers with their conditions and evidence
• The data terms
• Keep only redistributable rows
• Cite a factor
• Open data