Measuring transport emissions is hard, but Climatiq makes it simple. We are proud to announce that v2 of our Freight API has been released to General Access.
Freight v2 includes following improvements to unlock more accurate emission estimations for improved decision-making and reporting:
Freight v2 is certified by the Smart Freight Centre under GLEC v3 standard, and aligned with the new ISO 14083 standard, making it a bulletproof solution to build emission visibility into supply chains.
The new version of our Freight API is available to try out in our new demo.
Read more about all the changes here →
The latest version of our AI-powered emission factor matching feature is released into preview, with improved matching accuracy, and average response time cut in half for a smoother user experience.
Moreover, we have revamped the workflow for emission factor suggestions: now, when you query the Suggest endpoint, it returns emission factors that match along with unique suggestion IDs. These IDs can be directly passed to the Autopilot Estimate endpoint which provides the final emission estimation and a detailed calculation breakdown.
We have released a new preview version of our Energy endpoint, improving the calculation methodology for more accurate emission calculations. Now, when querying our Energy API, you can specify a subdivision in UN LOCODE (e.g. DE-BER for Berlin, Germany) to account for higher resolution grid data.
We have also added support for biogenic emissions reporting for our fuel endpoint, as well as data for 17 more countries. Read more here →
Data version 18, including, but not limited to:
New key datasets:
Updated:
Freight & Travel:
Procurement:
We have simplified our data versioning based on user feedback. The previous format used a major.minor format (eg. 16.16). Now, when querying the API, you only need to specify the major version (e.g. 16).
Data versions are only relevant if you are using Climatiq’s /search or /estimate endpoints. All other calculation endpoints automatically handle data versioning, always using the latest and most accurate emission factors.
Our API documentation and data versioning guide have been fully updated to explain the difference between the two versioning options: fixed and dynamic. We've also added guidance to help you choose the best option based on your needs. For most applications, we recommend using dynamic versioning, which ensures automatic updates as emission factors improve.
Read our data versioning guide here →
Tracking carbon emissions in the supply chain is complex, especially when there’s a high number of procured components to consider. That’s why we are launching a manufacturing-specific model for Autopilot, specifically designed to match bills of materials, component purchase orders, and procurement ledgers to emission factors.
The Manufacturing model is available for new and existing customers on demand.
Request access to the Autopilot Manufacturing model here →
We’re introducing a new part of the Climatiq stack, the Project Management API, to enable user-friendly deployment of Climatiq’s emission calculation solutions to users in software environments.
It allows you to manage projects and API keys via code using a top-level API key. This way, you can retrieve projects and issue API keys directly from your app, saving time and eliminating the need for manual actions in the Climatiq Dashboard. Learn more here →
Data version 17, including new key datasets:
Updated:
Check out our Data changelog for more information →
Freight & Travel:
Microsoft Excel & Google Sheets plug-ins:
Significant improvements have been implemented in our Energy feature, including:
Additionally, our energy feature now includes biogenic emissions for calculations performed using BEIS/DEFRA, EPA, CBAM, and GHG Protocol emission factors – with more coverage coming soon.
Biogenic carbon refers to carbon dioxide released during the combustion or decomposition of organic matter, such as plants and trees. Reporting biogenic CO2 separately is crucial for accurate environmental impact assessments, ensuring transparency and compliance with sustainability standards including GRI and ESRS.
Biogenic emissions are labeled by a new source_lca_activity - biogenic_co2_combustion.
Read our guide on biogenic emissions here →
With millions of users worldwide, Microsoft Excel is the go-to tool for data analysis, reporting, and planning. Our new Microsoft Excel app brings carbon insights to this universally recognized platform by providing easy, no-code access to Climatiq’s comprehensive emission factor data and powerful carbon calculation tools.
Available for beta access on the Microsoft AppSource marketplace, this add-in enables users to connect to Climatiq’s APIs to retrieve emission factors and automate complex carbon calculations–all within their familiar spreadsheet environment.
Easily estimate emissions directly in Excel spreadsheets using pre-built formulas for all of our API endpoints, including CBAM, Intermodal Freight, Travel, and Procurement. Additionally, users can search Climatiq’s database to find suitable emission factors using our AI-powered mapping tool, Autopilot.
During the beta period, the Excel add-in is available for free for non-commercial use, supporting up to 500 emission calculations per month.
Read our guide to learn more, and request access here →
Data versions 15.15 and 16.16, including new key datasets:
Updated data:
Check out our Data changelog for the full details →
Freight & Travel:
Energy:
Data Explorer:
Google Sheets Integration:
Last month, we released a preview of Source Trail feature for our Travel and Freight v2 endpoints. We are now adding this functionality to all other API calculation endpoints, including Procurement, Energy, Cloud Computing, and CBAM.
This feature provides transparency around the methodology and emission factor selection for each calculation, so that you can use the calculated results with confidence for reporting and analysis. Learn more →
The Source Trail can be supplemented with our Audit Trail add-on, which enables auditors to easily replicate calculations and understand the underlying methodology.
We have expanded our coverage of industry-specific inflation values by incorporating 2023 EU data published by Eurostat.
Adjusting for inflation is crucial when using EXIOBASE for calculating spend-based carbon footprint estimates. Aligning expenditure values to the year of the model's data ensures precise calculations, even when dealing with timeframes beyond the model's original scope. Learn more about inflation adjustments here →
To ensure the best experience with calculations involving the life cycle assessment process, we have released a new guide that covers the use of the source_lca_activity flag and how to select the correct LCA activities. Read it here →
We have also revised our previous LCA guide to include more details about the LCA concept and the updates we have introduced over the last few months.
We want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our Discord community for being an integral part of our journey at Climatiq. As we continue to grow, we’ve identified a new channel for providing support more efficiently.
Starting July 5th, 2024, we will discontinue our Discord server and provide support through a dedicated form.
Data version 14.14, including three new datasets:
Updated:
Freight:
Search:
Travel:
With the Freight v2 release just around the corner, our new rail routing algorithm is now available as an opt-in. With this algorithm, rail leg distances will use actual network data for the US, APAC and EMEA regions, greatly increasing precision and therefore making emission estimates more accurate.
To try out this feature, include the opt-in "preview_routing": true flag in the rail leg details when making an API request. Read more here →
Interested in accessing the Freight API? Reach out to our sales team →
We are releasing a preview version of the Source Trail feature in Travel and Freight v2 endpoints.
Source Trail offers insights into the emission factors used during complex emissions calculations. This feature is enabled by default, and provides the emission factor used, its source/publisher, the specific dataset, as well as additional metadata, such as the applicable year and region. Full description found here →
Users can supplement this feature with our Audit Trail add-on, which enables auditors to easily replicate calculations and understand the underlying methodology. Learn more →
We have released a new add-on to our Classification and Procurement features, which maps NAICS codes to EPA emission factors – greatly simplifying emission calculations for North America. This functionality is also available in the Procurement endpoint. Learn more →
Moreover, we have added new rules for matching NACE codes, which means better success rates in case of trailing or preceding 0’s.
Interested in accessing the Classifications API? Reach out to our sales team →
New data version 13.13, including:
Google Sheets Add-on:
Climatiq_Calculate_CBAM) and Autopilot Override endpoint (Climatiq_Calculate_Autopilot_Override) are now availableAutopilot:
We are excited to release two new endpoints for Autopilot: the Suggest endpoint, which enables better discovery of matched emission factors, and the Override endpoint, which allows for greater control over the selection of factors.
Autopilot Suggest returns multiple suggested emission factors instead of one, providing the ability to choose the best match. Number of returned options can be adjusted, allowing max. 20 suggestions to be returned. Suggestions are ordered by confidence score to simplify decision-making. Check out the documentation for more details →
Override allows you to manually replace the factors used by Autopilot for future instances of the provided prompt, allowing for precise adaptation to specific use cases. Full description found here →
Other updates to Autopilot include:
Number and Volume units are now available as inputs for estimates in addition to Weight and MoneyInterested in accessing Autopilot? Reach out to our sales team →
We've released a suite of updates for the Intermodal Freight v2 preview endpoint, featuring the addition of electric trucks and vans as transport modes in North America, as well as granular state-level data for the US. Read more here →
Other updates include:
planned_distance_km to enable more accurate emission estimatesNew data version 12.12, including:
Energy:
As an accredited provider by the Smart Freight Center, we're excited to unveil a preview version of our v2 Intermodal Freight endpoint, aligned with the latest GLEC v3 Framework and the new ISO 14083 standard for measuring and reporting greenhouse gasses in transportation.
This version incorporates the most recent emission factors released by the Smart Freight Center organization and introduces a host of enhancements, including support for electric trucks and vans using location-based electricity factors, the ability to account for emissions from logistics hubs, and end-to-end emission coverage for a refrigerated supply chain.
The preview version is available to all users with the Intermodal Freight endpoint enabled. Once out of preview, we recommend transitioning to version 2 to ensure access to the latest GLEC emission factors and other updates.
For detailed information, be sure to review the full v2 release notes, along with our new v2 guide and documentation.
Interested in accessing this endpoint? Reach out to our sales team →
Stay tuned for additional enhancements, such as US rail support, an updated audit trail, and other improvements.
In line with our commitment to providing our customers with the most accurate and comprehensive data, we’ve added the latest version of ecoinvent emission factors to Climatiq’s emission factor database.
ecoinvent is a leading provider of global environmental data based on the inputs and outputs of human activities, modeling the various steps of supply chain products and services. Climatiq’s emission factor database currently covers over 34,000 ecoinvent emission factors across 300 regions and 11,000+ activities.
Version 3.10 comes with 7,000+ new emission factors and 16,000 data modifications across various sectors, including Agriculture, Buildings and Infrastructure, Consumer Goods and Services, Energy, Equipment, Materials and Manufacturing, Transport, and Waste. Notably, v3.10 covers over 95% of the world’s petroleum and natural gas production.
View the new dataset and read the data full release changelog here.
Learn more about our partnership with ecoinvent→
Our February release marked the exciting launch of our API's General Availability version. The beta URLs under beta4.api.climatiq.io will remain accessible for the next year, until April 10th, 2025. However, to ensure a smooth transition, we highly recommend updating your integrations to use the new GA URLs as soon as possible.
Ready to upgrade? Check out our guide with migration details here →.
Our AI-powered calculation endpoint, Autopilot, provides a confidence level in the calculation results. This indicates the accuracy of the mapping between the input and the assigned emission factor, categorized as high, medium, or low.
To further enhance the precision and granularity of our automated calculations, we've introduced a new cosine similarity score. This numeric score, ranging from 0 to 1, signifies the degree of semantic similarity between the input data and the selected emission factor, where a higher score indicates a closer semantic meaning.
By combining the confidence level and match similarity score, Autopilot provides you with a comprehensive view of the mapping process and the potential need for further analysis.
Finding the right emission factors is crucial for accurate calculations. Search is one of the core resources of our platform, enabling users to find the right data points among the continuously growing dataset of factors.
We've optimized the search function, resulting in a significant 40-50ms reduction in response time for free-text queries. This means users can access the data they need even faster.
Climatiq is deeply committed to trust and data transparency. We recognize the crucial role of third-party verification, which not only reinforces our own commitment to security but also instills confidence in our partners and their customers.
In alignment with this principle, we've successfully achieved SOC 2 Type 1 certification to supplement our ISO 27001 certification. This comprehensive assessment scrutinizes the design of our systems, tools, and strategies, reinforcing the robustness and reliability of our platform and ensuring data security through established processes and controls.
Check out the certificate on our trust report→
New data version 10.10, including:
Climatiq’s API was launched in July of 2021 in beta, and within the last 6 months alone, we’ve powered over 1 billion emission calculations.
Since the launch, our team has made countless improvements that enable our customers and partners to easily embed carbon insights into their tools – empowering better decision-making and climate action worldwide.
Based on the valuable feedback we’ve received from our users, we are thrilled to graduate our beta4 to a stable version so you can build with confidence and scalability. This milestone marks a significant achievement in our platform's growth and maturity. Going forward, we are rolling out a structured endpoint versioning to ensure backward compatibility.
Existing integrations will continue to function and beta4 users will not experience any changes. We will provide ample time over the next 12 months for you to migrate to the newest version.
Check out the full GA release notes and migration guide
With this release, we are also launching API Versioning alongside our existing Data Versioning. API Versioning enables rapid iterations so you can access and test new features faster.
We now group and version endpoint URLs supporting the same feature or domain, such as data/v1/estimate and /data/v1/search, which provides a simple overview of which endpoints work together. This facilitates speedy updates and releases without impacting the URL for everyone.
We're also introducing preview URLs for endpoints under development, providing early access to new features, with a structured transition during newer version releases.
Learn more about API Versioning
Our free Google Sheets add-on offers an easy, no-code solution for using Climatiq’s carbon estimation API – increasing the accessibility of our technology and empowering teams to build solutions faster.
This add-on helps you get started with emission calculations in your spreadsheets, try out Climatiq’s carbon calculations, build proof of concepts, and evaluate feasibility with your team before fully integrating the API.
The add-on offers pre-built custom formulas for all of our API endpoints, including travel, cloud computing, fuel and electricity consumption, shipping and freight logistics, and purchased goods and services. Users can also search Climatiq's emission factor database to find the right factor for a specific use case.
The Google Sheets add-on can be used across all endpoints for non-commercial use free of charge for up to 500 emission estimations per month.
Follow these steps to get started:
Please get in touch with us to share your feedback so we can continue to improve this add-on. For questions, reach out to our support team.
New data version 9.9, including:
We’ve updated:
Intermodal Freight:
Autopilot:
Search and Data Explorer:
API Docs:
The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a cross-border carbon tax designed to support the EU’s objective of achieving climate neutrality by 2050. It adjusts EU import prices for selected materials based on their production-related CO2 emissions, aiming to prevent carbon leakage by discouraging the shift of emissions to countries with more lenient regulations. According to CBAM, companies importing goods like iron, cement, and electricity into the EU must now measure and report indirect emissions generated overseas, and ultimately pay an emission tax.
Climatiq's CBAM calculation feature automates carbon emission and certificate price estimates, empowering you to lower your carbon tax exposure and remain compliant with CBAM regulations. By utilizing CN (Combined Nomenclature) codes, the production region, and weight for imported goods, you can easily calculate embedded emissions and the approximate cost of carbon certificates for each import – with global coverage across CBAM categories: Iron & Steel, Aluminum, Cement, and Fertilizer. These calculations are achieved using EU-published benchmark emission factors and the 2023 average auction price from the EU-ETS.
Following CBAM requirements, our solution provides both the direct and indirect emissions that occurred during the production of the imported goods. To maintain traceability, it also returns a complete audit trail containing all the calculation details including the matched emission factor and source dataset used, LCA activity, potential quality flags and notices, among others.
Note that this is a paid Calculate feature - please get in touch if you'd like to learn more and try it out.
New data version 8.8, including emission factors from:
We’ve updated:
Our newly launched Autopilot feature combines the power of carbon measurement expertise and machine learning. It automates complex activity- and spend-based emission calculations, making scope 3 insights easily accessible. Leveraging a proprietary natural language processing (NLP) model, Autopilot instantly matches unstructured text from sources like purchase orders or invoices, incorporating information about purchased materials, volumes, and amounts to the correct emission factors, and generates precise and compliant carbon estimates.
Autopilot is a plug & play solution, intelligently adapting to existing data structures and removing the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual mapping.
To ensure accuracy and continuous improvement, it incorporates an expert-in-the-loop framework, where Climatiq’s greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting experts play a crucial role in quality assurance and output validation.
See Autopilot in action: Celonis recently announced the launch of their Material Emissions App. Powered by Climatiq’s Autopilot feature, this solution intelligently maps materials from purchasing systems to the appropriate emission factors, enabling companies to measure, analyze, and mitigate scope 3 emissions. Read about the Material Emissions App.
Refer to our API documentation for specification details.
Note that this feature is a paid add-on - please get in touch if you'd like to join our waiting list to try it out.
We’re excited to announce the integration of over 1,500 IEA emission factors into our dataset, powering more accurate and comprehensive emission estimates for electricity generation and consumption across over 150 regions. The IEA database is the foremost source of global energy data, with factors spanning from 1971 to the present, covering 95% of the global energy supply.
Aligned with internationally recognized definitions and methodologies, it’s a reliable resource for comparing, modeling, and tracking energy emissions.
Through this data partnership, we are bolstering our solutions to enable more precise emission calculations for energy generation and consumption. This underscores our dedication to providing comprehensive global coverage and granular scientific data.
Note that these factors are only available as a paid add-on through our Energy feature and Estimate feature.
Coming soon - Our CBAM calculation feature is currently in development. CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) is a cross-border tariff for EU imports of selected materials based on their production-related CO2 emissions. This means that starting January 2024, companies importing goods like iron, cement, and electricity into the EU must now measure and report emissions generated overseas. Our CBAM feature will empower businesses to calculate emissions following CBAM regulations and ensure full compliance.
We’re looking for early testers. If you’re interested, please get in touch.
New data version 7.7, including:
We’ve removed:
We’ve updated:
Intermodal Freight:
Travel:
Autopilot:
At Climatiq, we have an unwavering commitment to trust and data transparency. We fully recognize the critical role of third-party verification, not only for our own assurance but also to provide the necessary confidence to our partners and their customers. In line with this commitment, we've successfully completed a comprehensive audit of our calculation APIs. This audit specifically focused on key areas such as Energy, Freight, and Procurement (scope 3.1), among others.
Consequently, our endpoints are now certified to be in conformity with the requirements of the two leading standards for carbon footprint quantification, namely ISO 14064, the international standard for GHG emissions inventories and verification, and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
This validation reinforces the robustness and reliability of our carbon intelligence solutions. Check out the certificate on our trust report and stay tuned for further developments in the coming months.
Users of the Energy and Audit Trail features now have enhanced capabilities in their API responses, making it easier to understand the methodology behind emission calculations. We've implemented an advanced audit trail that outlines key information on how the calculation was made to easily review and, if necessary, independently reproduce the results. Responses can be stored and used for future validations such as audits.
See the new response examples and the updated "Response models" section in our docs.
Fallbacks are simple and powerful ways to improve the usability of our APIs. To streamline the processing of large datasets, we are introducing a year_fallback. This feature automatically finds the closest emission factor to the provided activity year, saving users from manual searches when data for their chosen year is unavailable.
You can now specify year_fallback:true for all endpoints that accept a Selector. If you specify e.g. year:2020 and there isn’t an exact match, the API will pick the closest emission factor to that year, e.g. 2021 or 2019. This works with our classification, custom-mapping, estimate, and all other endpoints that accept a selector override, such as cloud computing.
Note that currently region_fallback and year_fallback can’t be used at the same time.
Refer to our API docs for more details.
With our new project management functionalities, teams can streamline collaboration workflows through an intuitive interface while maintaining oversight across their projects.
New Projects Screen
New Collaborative Members Screen
Introducing improved control and insights into your API usage. These improvements are designed to help you monitor and analyze your API usage more effectively.
Autopilot is our new AI-driven calculation endpoint. It uses a proprietary natural language processing (NLP) model paired with Climatiq’s scientific expertise to streamline complex spend- and activity-based emission calculations, making carbon insights accessible to non-experts. It enables users to provide raw text content from, for instance, purchase orders or invoices, automatically matches raw text content to the correct emission factors, and delivers accurate and compliant emission estimates.
See Autopilot in action: Celonis recently announced the launch of their Material Emissions App. Powered by Climatiq’s Autopilot feature, this solution intelligently maps materials from purchasing systems to the correct emission factors, enabling companies to measure, analyze, and mitigate scope 3 emissions.
Read more about the Celonis Material Emissions App and get in touch with us if you'd like to try it out.
New data version 6.6, including:
We’ve removed:
Improvements:
Energy
All API versions prior to beta4 have been retired. Check out our migration guide if you haven’t switched to beta4.
Our new Travel feature makes it easy to understand the carbon impact of journeys worldwide. Fully aligned with the GHG Protocol, the Travel feature provides distance- and spend-based calculations for scope 3.6 emission reporting to enable more sustainable business travel. Our solution maps seamlessly to any form of travel records like tickets, receipts, itineraries, or expense reports.
Get started quickly with automatic distance calculations and emission factor selection, including built-in fallbacks. Benefit from flexible address inputs, be it postal/ZIP codes, street addresses, city names, or IATA codes and calculate precise route-specific emission estimates. When more granular travel data is available, dynamic parameters like cabin class, vehicle size, or engine type provide an additional level of accuracy.
With its new and improved capabilities, the Travel feature replaces our legacy Flight endpoint, which will be deprecated soon. For those who are still using our Flight endpoint, please migrate to the new endpoints.
Read our guide for travel calculation methodologies and refer to our API documentation for implementation details.
Note that this feature is a paid add-on - please get in touch if you'd like to trial or learn more about this feature.
You can now use UNSPSC codes to calculate emissions from spend data. UN Standard Product and Service Codes (UNSPSC) provide a standardized classification system for buyers and sellers to easily communicate product information.
Our Classification and Procurement endpoints now accept UNSPSC codes at the family level, in addition to the existing support for ISIC, NACE, and MCC codes. With this addition, activities categorized using UNSPSC codes can easily map to EXIOBASE emission factors for streamlined emission calculations.
After months of auditing processes, we are excited to announce our ISO 27001 certification, following the international gold standard for information security management. This certification validates our adherence to global information security standards and reiterates our commitment to trust and credibility with our customers and partners.
You can find the Climatiq trust report here - a transparent resource for our certifications, documents, security procedures, and monitoring.
New data versions 4.4 and 5.5, including:
Energy endpoints
Cloud Computing endpoints
Our new Energy feature provides the most comprehensive solution for automating complex carbon calculations for consumed energy - delivered through an easy-to-use API. Covering all three GHG emission scopes in line with the GHG Protocol and SBTi requirements, our solution offers calculation endpoints for used electricity, heat, steam, and fuel combustion. This enables users to understand and report the total impact of their energy consumption through a reliable toolkit and transparent methodology.
The electricity endpoint supports both market- and location-based methodologies, equipping users with everything they need to calculate electricity-related emissions with unmatched accuracy. It incorporates emission factors for over 120 global regions including local factors in the United States and Canada for true worldwide coverage. Moreover, users can leverage provider-specific factors from electric utilities in the UK (and soon the US) in line with the market-based method. Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) can also be specified and automatically allocated for enhanced precision.
Additional support for scope 3.3 Fuel and Energy-Related Activity (FERA) calculations allows users to integrate upstream energy-related emissions, ensuring a thorough capture of indirect carbon footprints beyond just direct operations. This includes Well-to-tank (WTT) emissions originating from the production of fuel used to generate electricity, heat, cooling, or steam. It also accounts for Transportation and Distribution (T&D) emissions, capturing losses from the point of generation to the point of consumption. Finally, the WTT of T&D is integrated as well, considering emissions from the production of fuel associated with T&D losses.
Read our Energy scope 2 and scope 3 guides to learn more about our methodologies, and refer to our API documentation for implementation details.
Note that this feature is a paid add-on - please get in touch if you'd like to trial or learn more about this feature.
We’re excited to announce the integration of Climate TRACE emission factors into our dataset, further enhancing the precision of our carbon calculations. Climate TRACE is a nonprofit that combines AI, data from 300 satellites, and remote sensing sources to construct the world’s first comprehensive record of GHG emissions based mainly on direct observation. Using this approach, Climate TRACE provides critical emission factors that were previously unavailable, filling in data gaps to bolster our solution and empower Climatiq users to achieve unmatched calculation accuracy. This new data covers categories such as fuel, building materials, mined materials, and metals across several countries worldwide.
Also included in our latest data release are over 600 scope 3 food and drink related emission factors sourced from the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP). WRAP, a renowned climate action NGO aims to assist Food and Drink businesses in reducing waste, fostering sustainable product development, and optimizing resource efficiency. This addition provides extensive coverage for the UK, complemented by select global factors to enable businesses in the food and drink sector to measure and track progress in reducing supply chain emissions.
Thanks to these data partnerships, we are extending our solutions to include more sectors and applications, reaffirming our commitment to comprehensive global coverage and granularity of scientific data.
We’ve released a new data version - 3.3 which includes:
For those who are still using legacy versions of our API, this is a friendly reminder to migrate to Beta4 now to access the latest capabilities. Older versions will be deprecated soon.
We are excited to announce the launch of our Procurement endpoint, specifically designed to provide advanced Scope 3.1 carbon footprint assessments. This new endpoint eliminates the complexity associated with spend-based calculations in accordance with EXIOBASE. It automatically determines basic prices by deducting trade, tax, and transport margins, specific to each country and sector. In addition, the endpoint provides automated currency conversions and inflation adjustments based on sector-specific inflation data from the European Central Bank, and country-specific rates provided by the World Bank to produce reliable calculations with little effort.
With flexible query options, including ISIC and NACE industry codes (support for UNSPSC codes coming soon) and Climatiq activity IDs, users have the ability to analyze data for a wide range of scenarios. In addition, custom margins can be provided to further enhance the accuracy and precision of calculations.
We collaborated with Prof. Richard Wood, a key developer of EXIOBASE, to design this endpoint. Prof. Wood is a member of our Scientific Advisory Board, where he provides important guidance to support the development of our solutions.
Learn how to get started with the Procurement endpoint through our handy guide here, and refer to our API documentation for implementation details.
Note that this feature is a paid add-on - please get in touch if you'd like to trial or learn more about this feature.
New API usage and subscription plan screens have been added to your dashboard. You can now track the number of monthly API calls made, together with a detailed breakdown for each endpoint so that you can monitor your consumption and manage your account limits. Additionally, you can review add-on features activated for your account and request access to additional capabilities.
Added: API version, data versioning, AR6 calculation method, audit_trail feature, ‘year’ logic, add-on endpoints, /unit-types endpoint, construction materials embodied emission factors
Updated: data quality flags, currency rates, data explorer, cloud computing endpoint, selector specification, improved factors, unit_type string categorisation
After a short break for easter egg hunting, we’re back with a major update, including a new API version (Beta4), data versioning capability, new logic for handling years, the AR6 calculation method, and many other changes & improvements. Here are a few of the major highlights.
We are excited to introduce Beta4, our latest API version, featuring improved performance and new capabilities. Upgrade your implementation now to get access to the latest enhancements. More details about the new features can be found below.
We recommend migrating to the new API version promptly, as older versions will no longer be supported and will soon be deprecated. If you are a Developer or Enterprise plan customer, please contact us if you require any assistance.
For all API updates, including breaking changes and specific migration instructions please see our migration guide.
The database underpinning Climatiq is frequently updated. New emission factors are regularly added, and existing factors are modified for various reasons, such as when a source publishes errata, new data quality flags are applied to existing emission factors, or when changes are made to a factor's metadata like activity_id or source_lca_activity value.
Updates like these often necessitate changes in your application. Therefore, we are now introducing the concept of data versioning, which allows you to choose when to opt-in to such changes, providing greater control over emission factors and data quality used in your calculations.
Our data versioning approach ensures that users can maintain stability in their applications while still having the option to access the most recent and accurate data when needed.
Please note that data versioning only applies to /estimate and /batch endpoints that require users to provide an emission selector in the API request. Endpoints like Cloud Computing, Intermodal Freight, Flights, and other advanced calculation endpoints that do not require a selector, will be automatically updated with the latest data version without user involvement.
For a detailed explanation of these changes and their implications, please refer to our data versioning guide.
This past March, the IPCC published their Sixth Assessment Report covering Climate Change in 2023. Throughout almost 8,000 pages, the AR6 goes into detail on the deep impacts we’re seeing as a result of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
They’ve also included an updated calculation method, which we’ve added as a default for sources that provide AR6 data. For information on calculation methods, see our co2e calculation documentation.
This update introduces customisable audit trails for calculations, which are invaluable for audit tracing and reporting compliance. Audit trails are used with our advanced endpoints, such as freight shipping, cloud computing, and classification.
Users can now control the visibility of these trails, enabling them for audit or record-keeping purposes. By default, audit trails will be turned off. If you're a user of these advanced endpoints and would like to access this capability, please contact us for more information.
We have implemented a new logic for handling years in emission factors. Previously, the year attribute corresponded to the publication year of the data source. Now, it accurately represents the year the data source deems most valid for the emission factor.
We’ve made changes to how we handle data quality flags in our calculations to align with current best practices and enhance the overall data quality. We kept the old default flags for those who still use them, but we have now introduced a new method.
Going forward, we won’t include emission factors flagged for certain types of data quality issues in calculations unless the user specifies them in the API request. For which data quality flags have been affected, see our beta4 migration guide.
Our Cloud Computing, Classifications and Custom Activities endpoints are now available as add-ons as part of our paid Developer or Enterprise plans, much like our Intermodal Freight endpoint. Please contact us if you are interested in using these features.
We have switched our source for monetary exchange rates to the UN treasury, improving the accuracy and reliability of our currency exchange data. As a result, you will see some changes in the CO2e currency-related endpoints as the new rates are implemented.
We’ve revamped our data explorer homepage to make it easier for you to find relevant emission factors. You can now access emission factors by featured sectors and categories directly from the new homepage, as well as see the most popular factors in our database.
We’ve also added new pages for individual activities and emission factors. These pages display in-depth information about our data at-a-glance.
See the full data release log here.
We are proud to announce that our Freight Transport API endpoint has achieved GLEC (Global Logistics Emissions Council) certification! As a globally recognised standard, GLEC ensures precise and consistent calculations of logistics emissions across supply chains. With this accreditation, you can confidently rely on the results from Climatiq's calculation engine for accurate, reliable results, suitable for audits, reports, and sharing with third parties—increasing their impact both within and beyond your organisation.
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We've also created a video guide to assist you in getting started. Check it out here:
We've enhanced our cloud storage, cpu, and memory endpoints by incorporating location-specific electricity data for more precise calculations. These endpoints now utilise region-specific electricity emission factors for each data centre, instead of basing emissions solely on storage, CPU, or memory consumption. For added customisation, you can also override the power usage effectiveness and the emission factor used, giving you even more control..
We've added new pages for each sector, category, and region on the Data Explorer to make browsing related factors easier and give you a better understanding of the data available. Here are some examples:
As our dataset continues to expand, we'll be introducing additional pages in the coming weeks to cover every aspect of the data.
The new source_dataset field has been added to all emission factors, now available alongside the source field in endpoints. This enhancement simplifies the identification and querying of specific datasets you're interested in, particularly when sources release multiple datasets.
In addition, we've added a new endpoint: emission-factors/source-dataset to help you explore the datasets issued by the sources available in Climatiq.
We have a number of new datasets and updates for you:
Calculate emissions from credit card spend
In addition to industry codes ISIC and NACE, we are now able to provide estimates based on Merchant Category Codes (MCCs), which are used to classify financial transactions globally. Simply hand up the code and the amount spent and a footprint will be provided for anywhere in the world and in most major currencies.
All-new cloud compute endpoint including embodied and dynamic power usage calculations
We’ve released a new computing endpoint, where you can input a specific virtual machine instance you’re renting, and get back a combined estimate for both the emissions and electricity consumption for the memory and cpu used, and also an embodied emissions for the underlying hardware.
GCP, AWS and Azure are supported with default values. If you have more details from your cloud provider, you can provide custom details such as average vCPU utilisation (load), specific power utilization efficiency (PUE) or electricity emissions factor (either from the Climatiq dataset or one uploaded by you).
Note that this feature is in alpha and therefore subject to change. Please do get in touch if you'd like to learn more about the feature.
Automated mapping tool now accepts data by API
Our custom activity mapper can now accept your taxonomy via an API endpoint. This allows you to send your (or your clients') internal categorisation to our activity mapping dashboard, where you can then view suggestions to map these labels to Climatiq activity IDs.
Self-reported emission factors now supported
We have added a "self-reported" flag, both as part of our updated compute endpoint above (for example we have included Google's electricity emission factors for use in estimating cloud emissions), and to pave the way for increasingly granular emission factors provided directly from companies - particularly useful for supply-chain assessment. If there is any particular data you would like to see (or to disclose your company’s data in our database) please get in touch.
Please note that emission factors with this flag will not be used in API responses by default due to their nature of the emission factor; these will need to be explicitly allowed to appear in requests using the allowed_data_quality_flags parameter.
Other improvements and fixes
Data releases
We have released a number of new datasets and updates, including:
After running the alpha through a thorough testing program, including hundreds of thousands of real-world tests in numerous client implementations, the intermodal logistics endpoint is ready for prime-time. It's fast and powerful, allowing you to get GLEC-compliant emission estimates broken down by leg and by use-phase and upstream emissions. Just provide two locations on the globe, a cargo weight and nominate a form of travel. The rest - from plotting routes to selection of most likely ports to electing GLEC-compliant emission factors - is done for you.
But that's not the end of the story; while the endpoint can give you a valid, fully transparent answer from minimal inputs, it can also accept a huge amount of more granular data as well: cargo types (e.g. chilled or unchilled), vehicle types (e.g. van or heavy goods vehicle), specific transport nodes for any given leg - all this and more can be accepted to provide ever-more accurate estimations. For an example of what it can do, check out the announcement with our partner Celonis.
Note that this feature is a paid add-on to the standard API subscription - please do get in touch if you'd like to trial or learn more about the feature.
We’ve given our Data Explorer an overhaul - emission factors are now grouped by their emission-generating activity, giving you more comprehensive search results over a range of activities when searching through the emission factors available in the API. In addition to this, our search algorithm has been completely revamped. While using the Data Explorer and the /search endpoint, you will see fewer, but much better results for any given query.
If you have ever attempted to assess emissions generated from electricity usage, you know it's not as straightforward as it might appear - there are a vast variety of emission factors and even more ways that they can or should be applied. So as a first step in helping people use the API to navigate their way through this, we have published a guide - the first in a series of guides on emission factor selection.
We have released a number of new datasets and expanded the range of several more to cover either retrospective years or the latest up-to-date factors:
The first iteration of our automatic activity mapping is here! This upgrades our activity mapping feature to provide suggestions as to what the appropriate Climatiq activity ID might be for your data. Simply add (singly or as a bulk upload) whatever labels you use for emission-releasing activities or consumption categories and then let our suggester find an ID to suit; in this first release you can filter results by source or unit type. Then simply accept the suggested activity ID for each, or find alternatives via the explorer. Once mapped, you can hand up your custom-defined activity label along with the appropriate parameters (kg of material purchased, kWh consumed, kilometres travelled, amount spent etc) to our /custom-activity endpoint to get a valid estimation back. Then relax - you never need worry about mapping your activities or material categories again - unless you add more! You can create multiple different mappings - they are unique per project, simply make sure you are using an API key associated to the correct project when you perform estimations.
Note that this feature is in alpha and will see significant performance improvements soon. We welcome feedback - please do get in touch if you've got feedback or like to learn more about the feature, upcoming improvements and how you can incorporate it into your build.
Climatiq now provides another piece of the puzzle for assessing cloud-based infrastructure: the embodied emissions associated with the equipment used to run cloud services via Azure, GCP or AWS. These factors allow you to estimate the impact of these embodied emissions, expressed per CPU-hour so that you can attribute back to your usage just as can be done with the emissions associated with the usage of cloud infrastructure from these three providers.
We have released a number of new datasets and expanded the range of several more to cover either retrospective years or the latest up-to-date factors:
We are very pleased to announce the launch of the first live use-case of our intermodal freight/logistics endpoint with our design partner, Celonis. This endpoint is now supplying road, sea and air route determination and GLEC-compliant CO2e estimations globally, as well as rail routes in Europe, to a range of live implementations - please get in touch if you would like to trial.
Two new data quality flags have been introduced: partial_factor to identify factors whose CO2e value represents only part of the emissions (typically CO2 only) and suspicious_homogeneity to highlight where we have detected potential boundary issues in the presentation of several factors. These and the existing flags can now be included in queries, allowing you to filter them in or out using a new allowed_data_quality_flags selector. Some flags are allowed by default in your queries to avoid backward compatibility issues. We recommend you read the data quality guide and the API reference and determine what sort of data quality issues you’re okay with accepting in your estimates; you will also see these flags highlighted and explained in the Data Explorer.
You may have noticed that things are being updated in the Data Explorer. This month we have released a number of tweaks to help browse emission factors and make understanding and performing API calls even easier. The most obvious is the new code snippets which are now present in each emission factor - simply click on the tab at the bottom of the factor and you can see exactly how to make an estimate using curl, including both request and response (with appropriate selectors and sample parameters).
A little while ago we announced our partnership with ecoinvent, one of the world's most comprehensive environmental datasets. These data now live in the Data Explorer right alongside the rest of the sources available in Climatiq. Note that access to ecoinvent data requires a paid license - get in touch with us if you like to know more about key environmental datasets like ecoinvent.
Our activity mapping tool now allows batch uploading, meaning you can add a full schema of custom activity labels mapped to Climatiq activity_ids in one go, and start making calls based on your own taxonomy. Stay tuned for more updates to our mapping capabilities, as we are working hard to develop some great new the tricky task of mapping activity data to emission factors.
We now have batch endpoints for the different compute endpoints including memory, CPU and storage. This is handy if you need to perform many computations at once. In other computing endpoint news, the computing metadata endpoint is now out of alpha - you can rely on it being stable between versions now.
We're very pleased to announce that the excellent work our science team do week in, week out is now front and centre in the Data Explorer! Where we have detected a data anomaly, there will now be an alert displayed and an explainer to tell you more about the issue found. Of course, these flags are available in the API so you can listen for them in your implementation.
Our GLEC-compliant freight endpoint (currently in alpha) is now able to route-plan intermodal logistics for road, sea and air. Just put in a geolocation (long/lat, postcode, city name, full address, or just a search query) and select your mode and let the endpoint do the rest. It will plot the route to the nearest port or airport and provide emissions estimates broken down by each leg, including scope 1 and 3 emissions. Just let us know if you'd like to join the alpha.
We're constantly improving our documentation based on your feedback - and after a few calls with users to understand how we can better describe the way LCA activity is handled by the API, we've updated our how-to guide.
You never go very far in the world of emissions assessment without hearing the term "ecoinvent". We've been working with the ecoinvent team to make the huge array of emission factors in their v3.8 dataset available to you via Climatiq's lightning-fast, distributed infrastructure so that you can embed the world's most widely-used materials/life-cycle emissions dataset right into the heart of your decision-making. You will be able to browse the dataset soon via our data explorer; in the meantime, just get in touch with us if you are interested in getting these data into your project.
Those familiar with our flights endpoint already know that it's fantastically helpful to have distance calculations taken care of. Now we're very pleased to be going into alpha with an intermodal version that will estimate road and sea freight emissions from and to any location in the world - whether you have coordinate, city name, postcode or any other type of address or location information. Compliant with the Global Logistics Emissions Council and, logistics movements are estimated in realtime incorporating factors such as traffic data, allowable routes, vehicle/vessel size, road gradient and plenty more. Please get in touch if you are interested in joining the alpha group trialling this new functionality.
Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) have released data for 2022 and we've now transformed this into nearly 700 emission factors to help bring your cloud computing measurements bang up to date.
The AIB has also released their 2022 national electricity grid factors for European nations.
Many of you have told us that while the datasets available in the API meet the majority of needs, sometimes there are specific emission factors that are needed for your project that can't be shared publicly - say a licensed dataset or footprints provided from suppliers. So we're very pleased to announce a new feature, available as an add-on to our Corporate or Commercial tier: Private Emission Factors. This feature allows you to add any emission factors to a secure environment via an uploader in our dashboard, making them available to you right alongside any of the currently available emission factors in our /estimate, /batch and /search endpoints. Contact us for more information on getting access to this feature.
We're delighted to announce that the default emission factors from the Global Logistics Emission Council (GLEC) Framework are now available via the Climatiq API. These are ready to use in your freight logistics estimations from today. Stay tuned for more on this front, as logistics is going to be a big focus for the next few months (grab me or one of the team if you want to learn more).
Here they are! Note that, as with any annual data update, any queries that are not specifically calling 2021 will automatically update to use 2022 data. As well as updating their existing factors based on the latest data available, BEIS have for the first time included emission factors for estimating homeworking emissions.
You can now specify a region_fallback boolean for the custom activity, classification and estimate endpoints selector. If this boolean is set to true and your initial estimate fails to find an emission factor specific to the country or region provided, Climatiq will automatically broaden your region to factors with the same ID mapped to regions the country falls within (for example Tanzania → Africa → Global) until it finds a compatible emission factor.
Data quality issues found by our science and data team are now highlighted within API responses. Climatiq has a tiered approach to handling of data quality issues; where emission factors are considered statistical outliers or otherwise seriously problematic, they are not included in the API. However, where the issues are less serious we include the datapoints to provide consistency with the source data, and provide a data_quality_flags in the response. Current flags are erroneous_calculation and notable_methodological_variance; details about the issues detected will be outlined in the description field of the emission factor in question. More details about this feature can be found in our how-to guide and in the data guidance of the OEFDB.
Speaking of how-to guides, we've overhauled our guides page with a new look and feel and added a couple of new guides in addition to the data quality guide above:
The data explorer has been updated to make it even easier to find the emission factor you need, with an update to filters allowing for selection of multiple categories at a time and regions now returning any sub-region of a country that you have filtered to (for example all US states will be returned if you filter to US rather than just US-wide factors).
After having to keep things very hush-hush we can now officially announce that Climatiq is one of just 50 launch apps on Stripe's brand new App Marketplace (announced 24th May). Our Emissions Calculator app allows any stripe merchant to assess the impact of every sale (and their entire sales history) based on GHG Protocol and EPA emission factors. We're very excited to be helping Stripe merchants understand their impact, as well as prompt action through Stripe's carbon removal fund.
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As well as this, we now support over 30 currencies, which will be converted in real-time for spend-based emission estimates.
We also released a number of improvements to our API error handling, including better descriptions of errors to help you understand what might have gone wrong.
Reminder: remember to cut over to the new search endpoint if you haven't already - we will soon be deprecating the emission factors endpoint to provide a much lighter (and more sustainable!) way of assessing the availability of factors.
...all of which takes us past 12,000 datapoints!🚀
We have added the ability to map your own custom taxonomies to Climatiq emission factors right in our dashboard. Just click on the Activity Mapping tool in the dashboard and once you have mapped your taxonomy to emission factor IDs, the custom activities endpoint will accept your own IDs as selectors in API calls. You can have different maps for each of your projects, giving you plenty of flexibility.
A new classifications endpoint has in now in alpha. This endpoint allows you to hand up industry codes (in this first release ISIC4 and NACE2) to the API, meaning activities can be automatically classified and estimated. In addition, as these codes map to each other via the UN correspondence tables, factors that aren't directly mapped to the code passed up can be automatically selected to ensure the most valid estimates are returned. There'll be more classifications to come soon, including NAICS and CPC, making it increasingly easy to get the best emission factor automatically - please do get in touch if there is a particular classification you would be interested in seeing supported.
The new search endpoint was released to replace the deprecated list emission factors endpoint to provide a much lighter way of assessing the availability of factors (please do move to the search endpoint if you are still using the list factors endpoint).
Since our last release notes we have:
Only rarely do we ship "versioned" releases, preferring to release continuously to prioritise getting our data and tools into your hands. However in this instance we have a range of exciting updates which involved the potential to break or interfere with existing implementations. Before we get to the details of the release, it's worth mentioning that we have published a handy migration guide to step you through switching from v2 to v3 - and don't worry, v2 will remain supported while you do. We intend for this to be the last beta release before we go into full production.
There's a lot there, so plenty of additions have been made to the docs page to help take advantage of the new functionality, including as mentioned the handy migration guide (note you can switch back to the v2 docs page using the selector in the sidebar).
We hope you had a chance to take some time to reflect on the past 12 months and to revive as we go into a huge year for tackling the climate crisis - 2022 feels make-or-break.
Here at Climatiq, while we’ve relished the chance to take stock, we haven’t slowed; we’re starting 2022 with a bang by announcing the addition of almost 400 spend-based EPA emission factors to the API. Having a dry January? Why not find out how much carbon you’re saving - now according to data release by either the UK or the US government.
There’s a very serious side to this of course - assessing supply chain emissions is a huge problem for companies, and while spend-based data isn’t perfect, in many cases it’s the only viable way of reporting. As such, the UK and US data will soon be joined by the high-level global numbers used by the GHG Protocol scope 3 calculator.
Want to make sure these numbers are comparable? We’ve got you covered: the Climatiq API provides currency conversion on the fly, based on the average rate of the year the emission factor was reported.
That’s not all of course - as ever, there’s a range of data and functionality additions since our last release communication, which you may already be using. In case you missed them:
Led by feedback from you, our beta community, this release includes a bundle of exciting updates. There's lots of detail on what has been updated and why in our release blog post, but here are the key things to know. We've:
These updates represent a significant improvement in both technical usability and in data quality and robustness. Above all, it sets us up for fast iteration in both including new emission factor data (look out for spend-based scope 3 factors soon) and rapid development of features in the API.
To take advantage of the new features and dataset you will need to update your queries based on the new version of the implementation docs available at docs.climatiq.io (but don't worry we still support the old version, so nothing will break).
