Procurement ADD-ONADD-ON

Spend-based estimations enable carbon footprint calculations for purchased goods and services (GHG Protocol Category 3.1) using expenditure data. They are especially valuable when precise activity data is not readily available. However, the application of spend-based emission factors can be complex. Some emission factor sources, like the UK-specific BEIS spend-based dataset, use the purchaser price directly. On the other hand, sources like EXIOBASE, the most popular provider of spend emission factors, call for the use of the basic price. It's essential to apply the basic price with EXIOBASE emission factors, as using purchaser prices may result in an overestimation of the calculated footprint.

Understanding Basic Price and Purchaser Prices

The basic price represents the initial cost set by a producer for a product or service, without additional fees like taxes or delivery costs (referred to as tax and transport margins). Trade margins and additional charges are often added to the basic price if you're not buying directly from the producer. The purchaser price, the total amount you usually pay, combines the basic price, trade margin, tax margin, and transport margin.

Another challenge with spend-based emission calculations is accurately adjusting for changes in currency exchange rates and inflation. Particularly, when your expenditure occurred in a different year than the emission factor's year, your expenditure amount has to be adjusted to match that emission factor's year. This requires taking into account both inflation adjustment and exchange rate fluctuations to arrive at the adjusted spend amount.

Procurement Endpoint

POST This endpoint automatically calculates basic prices for use with EXIOBASE (opens in a new tab). The endpoint accounts for tax, trade and transport margins using per-sector and per-country margins from EXIOBASE, if no user-supplied margins are provided. The endpoint also corrects for currency exchange rates and inflation adjustments, using rates from the UN Treasury, supplemented with per-industry inflation numbers from Eurostat.

Note on EXIOBASE Margins

EXIOBASE margins are experimental and are subject to potentially significant uncertainties. They're a good starting point if you don't have specific margin data. However, if you have custom margin values, we recommend using them for precise results. Not taking margins into account at all will lead to overestimation of your emissions.

https://api.climatiq.io/procurement/v1/spend

Request

This endpoint accepts the following parameters:

Request parametersShould be sent as a JSON object in the body

activityrequired ActivityDescription object
The activity associated with the spending. You may specify either a classification code and classification type, or an activity ID.
spend_yearrequired integer
The year when the goods or the services were purchased.
spend_regionrequired string
The UN/LOCODE of the region where the expenditure occurs. For the most accurate results, specify the country of production as the spend_region. If unknown, the country of purchase should be used. Remember that you will need to add transport emissions if the product is shipped from the spend_region to another location.
moneyrequired float
The amount of money spent.
money_unitrequired string
The currency in which the money amount is expressed, in any of the supported currencies.
tax_marginfloat
The contribution of tax margins to the final purchaser price. Should be a number below 1, representing 100% contribution. Tax margins can be negative in the case of subsidies.
Default Value
Margin extracted from EXIOBASE
trade_marginfloat
The contribution of trade margins to final purchaser price. Should be a number greater or equal to 0 but lesser than 1, representing 0% and 100% contribution respectively.
Default Value
Margin extracted from EXIOBASE
transport_marginfloat
The contribution of transport margins to the final purchaser price. Should be a greater or equal to 0 but lesser than 1, representing 0% and 100% contribution respectively.
Default Value
Margin extracted from EXIOBASE

ActivityDescription

You can describe the activity either by using a classification code and classification scheme, or an activity ID.

Classification Code

classification_coderequired string
The classification code.
classification_typerequired string
The classification scheme; currently supported are nace2, isic4, mcc or unspsc.

Activity ID

activity_idrequired string
The EXIOBASE activity ID for the activity

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.climatiq.io/procurement/v1/spend \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $CLIMATIQ_API_KEY" \
  --data '{
  "activity": {
        "classification_code": "25",
        "classification_type": "isic4"
    },
    "spend_year": 2022,
    "spend_region": "DE",
    "money": 100,
    "money_unit": "eur",
    "tax_margin": 0.2
}'

Response

The response includes the CO2e estimate and details about the calculation.

Attribute
estimate Estimation The estimation performed returning the total CO2e value, constituent gases and more.
calculation_details object Details about the calculation, including applied tax, trade, and transport margins and inflation. Note that this is only returned if audit trail is enabled, otherwise it is `null`
notices array of Notices Any notices related to the calculation.

The calculation_details object includes the following attributes.

Attribute
tax_margin number The tax margin applied in the calculation.
trade_margin number The trade margin applied in the calculation.
transport_margin number The transport margin applied in the calculation.
inflation_applied number The compound inflation applied in the calculation. This is e.g. `0.17` if 17% inflation occurred between the emission factor and spend year. Climatiq will automatically apply inflation or deflation depending on the years.

{
    "estimate": {
        "co2e": 15.66,
        "co2e_unit": "kg",
        "co2e_calculation_method": "ar5",
        "co2e_calculation_origin": "source",
        "emission_factor": {
            "name": "Fabricated metal products/except machinery and equipment",
            "activity_id": "metal_products-type_fabricated_metal_products_except_machinery_equipment",
            "id": "e321a1d8-442a-4d07-8034-8249a2a4a455",
            "access_type": "public",
            "source": "EXIOBASE",
            "source_dataset": "EXIOBASE 3",
            "year": 2019,
            "region": "DE",
            "category": "Fabricated Metal Products",
            "source_lca_activity": "unknown",
            "data_quality_flags": []
        },
        "constituent_gases": {
            "co2e_total": 15.66,
            "co2e_other": null,
            "co2": null,
            "ch4": null,
            "n2o": null
        },
        "activity_data": {
            "activity_value": 61.03,
            "activity_unit": "eur"
        },
        "audit_trail": "enabled"
    },
    "calculation_details": {
        "tax_margin": 0.2,
        "trade_margin": 0.09792972014,
        "transport_margin": 0,
        "inflation_applied": 0.15036269600000027
    },
    "notices": []
}

Notice

The notices array can contain these objects:

Notice attributes
severity string Either `warning` or `info`. `warning` is for messages that might lead to inaccurate calculations. You should check these to make sure the results are fit for your intended purpose. `info` is for information that will help you understand the calculation result better.
message string An explanation of the notice.
code string A programmatic value you can use to disambiguate the different notice types.

The different possible values for code are as follows. You should not treat this list as exhaustive as more values may be added with time:

Notice Code Value	Description
`partial_inflation_adjustment`	Inflation adjustment was applied only partially, not covering the entire period.
`no_inflation_adjustment`	No inflation adjustment was made to the procurement. This could be because there is no data for the `spend_country` or inflation data is missing for the entire period.
`trade_margin_not_applied`	No valid tax margin was found to apply to the procurement's basic price.
`tax_margin_not_applied`	No valid tax margin was found to apply to the procurement's basic price.
`transport_margin_not_applied`	No valid tax margin was found to apply to the procurement's basic price.

Batch Procurement Endpoint

POST For bulk data-processing, this endpoint has a batch endpoint variant allowing for up to 100 calculations with one API call.

The batch endpoint is available at:

https://api.climatiq.io/procurement/v1/spend/batch

Provide this endpoint with an array of objects, where each object is a valid body for the non-batch endpoint. See the batch endpoint documentation for more information about how batch endpoints work and how to handle errors.

Freight Classifications