The first step towards net zero business operations: measuring the emissions behind each business trip, company meal, or laptop purchased. But when operational data isn’t available, companies are left grasping for a foothold to use as a base for their calculations.
The spend-based method offers a solution, because it pulls on something almost every company has: expenditure data. Spend data offers a strong starting point to calculate emissions for fragmented categories such as scope 3.1 (purchased goods and services), which makes up to 90% of most companies’ footprints. It’s faster to implement than activity-based methods and provides a lens to identify emission hotspots where you need to refine calculations with more granular data.
The Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive (CEDA) is provided by Watershed. It contains 60,000 spend-based factors across 148 countries and one RoW region, and 400 industries, spanning 95% of GDP.
CEDA has two options for accessing its data: Open CEDA and Enterprise CEDA. Open CEDA offers a free version of the data for all to access. Enterprise CEDA provides emission factor breakdowns across scopes, constituent gases, and FLAG and non-FLAG emissions, as well as a selection of extra factors covering FLAG commodities.
Scope breakdowns split emission factor values between scope 1 (direct emissions), scope 2 (emissions from purchased energy), and scope 3 (all other indirect emissions occurring across a company's value chain). This makes it simpler than ever for companies reporting following the GHG Protocol to appropriately attribute emissions to each scope. Constituent gas breakdowns (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulphur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride) and FLAG (Forests, Land and Agriculture) breakdowns similarly offer an extra layer of granularity that proves invaluable for annual reporting, and will be available in Climatiq soon.
For companies doing spend-based carbon accounting, Enterprise CEDA will let you be a lot more granular in your reporting. It adds even more spend-based factors to Climatiq’s 1,000,000 factor database containing both spend- and activity-based emission factors. This means that instead of juggling multiple sources, the Climatiq database allows businesses to complement activity-based datasets with comprehensive spend-based data for worldwide coverage across hundreds of industries for full scope reporting. All data is GHG Protocol-compliant and scientifically verified by Climatiq.
With the addition of Enterprise CEDA, the Climatiq database offers new options for spend-based carbon accounting, while also enhancing Climatiq’s dedicated Procurement and Travel tools with more data.
Customers can access factors from Enterprise CEDA in Climatiq’s Data Studio, Excel add-in, or API integrations, or get AI-powered factor mappings from Autopilot, making it easy to browse, select, and calculate with the data. All emission factors are processed under rigorous normalization and quality standards, allowing users to get an accurate first assessment of carbon footprint, benchmark suppliers effectively, and ensure reliable data for reporting.
To use Enterprise CEDA through Climatiq, contact our sales team to license the data.
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