Our Impacts and EmissionFactors.com are powered using Ecometrica’s extensive emission factors database, available for integration with your internal or web-based systems through the use of our Application Programming Interface (API). The database is maintained and updated by Ecometrica’s senior analyst team and contains over 40,000 data points, including emission and conversion factors.

The API is capable of providing responses in JSON, XML and HTML. Up-to-date documentation is available online, and is presented clearly and concisely, to support you throughout the integration process and during maintenance and updates to your solutions. The API comes with its own pricing structure for commercial use – however, Ecometrica also makes free API keys available to developers who are building their own not-for-profit applications.

API Features

Time, Location, Activity

In order for an assessment to be accurate, emission factors need to be specific to the time and location of your data, and need to correspond to the activity for which you are calculating emissions. The flexibility of our API allows you to choose the specific time, location and activity for which emission and conversion factors are needed, ensuring that the most accurate and relevant factor is applied to your data every time.

Extensive Database

The database offers emission and conversion factors for a wide range of emission activities. Conversion factors automatically convert the data you have on hand to the unit used by the best emission factor available, while emission factors are applied to your data to determine the emissions resulting from a specific activity.

Currently, the database contains:

• Over 9,000 emission factors, including the most up-to-date factors published by the IPCC, Defra/DECC, the EPA, and Environment Canada
• Emissions factors for a wide selection of activities, including electricity consumption, natural gas consumption, other fuel use, waste, refrigerant gas loss, vehicle travel, air travel, travel by public transit and taxi, hotel night stays and freight transportation by ground, sea, rail and air
• Over 30,500 conversion factors, including factors related to fuel efficiency, fuel and energy prices, energy benchmarks, fuel density, fuel calorific values, waste density,and average journey length for different modes of travel
• A complete selection of standard conversion factors relevant to typical assessment data units
• Geographically specific emission and conversion factors for most countries, regions, counties, provinces, states and cities (where available)

Follow Protocol

An accurate and complete assessment accounts for all seven Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride. The Ecometrica database contains the relevant factors for each gas, making it easy for you to accurately and fully account for your emissions, and facilitating compliance with greenhouse gas reporting protocols. In addition, the database contains multiple sets of global warming potentials in order for you to correctly convert emissions from individual greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide equivalent based on the requirements of the protocol you use.

Reputable Sources

The database contains only emission and conversion factors published or derived from reputable sources, so you can be confident in the accuracy of your results. Among the trusted institutions from which Ecometrica sources data for the database are:

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
• The Department of Energy and Climate Change
• The International Energy Agency
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• Environment Canada
• The Western Climate Initiative
• Carbon Trust
• Climate Registry
• GHG Protocol Brazil
• The Government of India
• Swedenergy
• Central Japan Railway Company
• Deutsche Bahn

Rigorous Quality Assurance

Every data piece entered into the database by our expert analysts undergoes a rigorous quality assurance process. Data is reviewed prior to and following integration into the database to ensure there are no errors, while regular testing allows you to be confident in the functionality of Ecometrica systems. Maintenance is built into the offering since the data within the database is constantly being reviewed and updated as new factors are made available.

If you’re a developer interested in accessing our API, contact us today for an informal chat.