Frequently Asked Questions

PlainEmissions presents the EU EDGAR v8.0 dataset, the EDGAR 2024 GHG release from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. It covers per-country, per-sector, per-year emissions for CO2, CH4, N2O and fluorinated gases from 1970 to 2023 for the major economies, using AR6 GWP100. We also document three other authoritative datasets researchers use, the World Bank Climate Knowledge Portal, Climate TRACE, and UNFCCC national inventories, and explain on the research and guide pages how their methods differ from EDGAR's. Totals exclude LULUCF (land use), which EDGAR reports separately.

EDGAR refreshes annually (typically Q3-Q4); PlainEmissions refreshes within four weeks of a major EDGAR release. The methodology page records the loaded vintage. The other datasets we reference (World Bank, Climate TRACE, UNFCCC) have their own cadences but are not currently loaded into the database.

Yes, all data and pages are free to view and free to cite. Upstream licenses (CC BY 4.0 for EDGAR, World Bank, and Climate TRACE; public for UNFCCC) carry through. Please credit the original upstream source when citing. For high-volume programmatic access or institutional data licensing, contact us at hello@plainemissions.com.

Methodology. UNFCCC inventories are self-reported by governments. EDGAR is a globally-consistent bottom-up model. Climate TRACE uses satellites and machine learning. The World Bank aggregates from multiple feeds. Disagreement is informative, it surfaces methodological uncertainty that single-source dashboards hide. PlainEmissions reports EDGAR's figures; the research and guide pages explain where the datasets diverge and why.

Land use, land-use change, and forestry is the most-disputed part of emissions accounting, disagreement among the major datasets can exceed 50% for some countries. EDGAR reports LULUCF separately from its main GHG dataset, so the totals on PlainEmissions exclude it; the LULUCF guide explains why it is treated apart rather than rolled into a single politically-charged number.

We use IPCC AR6 100-year global-warming-potential multipliers: CO2 = 1, methane = 27.9, nitrous oxide = 273, with higher multipliers for F-gases (HFC, PFC, SF6, NF3). The fact table retains the native unit value alongside the CO2-equivalent value for transparency.

PlainEmissions is an informational research platform, not an ESG attestation service. The underlying upstream sources are widely used by ESG analysts, but specific compliance use cases (CSRD, TCFD, SBTi) typically require direct source attribution. For institutional research-data licensing inquiries, contact us at hello@plainemissions.com.