Which emission factors do we use?

The available emission factors for a PCF depend on the selected standard.

The Climate Hub provides predefined standard activities from the following databases. These are regularly updated:

• Umweltbundesamt (UBA) incl. ProBas (Prozessorientierte Basisdaten für Umweltmanagement-Instrumente)

• Ecoinvent (factors only visible if a license is purchased)

• Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

• Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC)
  
  

In addition, the Climate Hub enables the search for emission factors via the external Climatiq database. As of May 2026, this provides users with around 500,000 emission factors from more than 60 databases.

The integration and use of these emission factors in the Climate Hub, as well as the underlying databases, are described in the following articles: activity-based and spend-based.

An ecoinvent license can optionally be purchased to access the corresponding ecoinvent data.

In addition, the recording for electricity consumption (Section 7) is available. This enables country-specific (upstream) emissions to be automatically taken into account.

Within the scope of the PACT and Catena-X standards, the Climate Hub does not provide predefined standard activities.

The search for activity-based emission factors is exclusively limited to the ecoinvent database.

In addition, the recording for electricity consumption (Section 7) is available. This enables country-specific (upstream) emissions to be automatically taken into account.