Why do you use Emissions Factors from countries outside our core operations?

Our approach always prioritises methodological robustness and consistency rather than selecting the lowest available factor.

For Scope 1 and Scope 2:

Emissions factors are always local where they are available and appropriate.
This includes country specific electricity, fuel, and energy factors published by government or recognised authorities.

For Scope 3:

The choice of emissions factor depends on data availability and granularity.
Many countries do not publish comprehensive or detailed Scope 3 factors for all activities.
In these cases, we apply high quality international datasets that are widely accepted and well documented.
Our 'Global default' emissions factor is prioritised based on the quality of the underlying data sources and the global relevance.

To learn about Trace's EF sources, please refer to this article.

Example 1: Transport and Travel activity factors

Most Governments, including the Australian Government (DCCEEW), do not publish public emissions factors for travel and transport activities such as freight, flights, public transport and vehicles. For these countries, we use UK DEFRA factors as these are widely regarded as one of the most robust, transparent, and internationally accepted government-published datasets.

DEFRA factors are frequently used as a default where local equivalents are not available at the same level of granularity, and their methodology is well documented and regularly updated, making them a credible and defensible choice.

Example 2: Spend factors

We use 3 sources for spend based (input : output) factors:

For Australian spend, we procure proprietary factors from FootprintLab (read more here).
For US spend we use EPA public factors
For UK spend we use DEFRA public factors

Where we do not have a spend based factors for the country of spend, we default to the Australian factor given the depth and robustness of the dataset.

Note that the country is based on the country of purchase not the country of origin. To learn more please read Are emissions factors based on the country of origin or country of procurement?

All spend is converted to the corresponding currency using the average FX rate at the time of purchase. To learn more please read this article.

Why do you use Emissions Factors from countries outside our core operations?

Emissions factors are selected based on relevance, quality, and availability. Where possible, Trace always uses local emissions factors. In some cases, particularly for Scope 3, suitable local data does not exist at the required level of detail.