Frequently Asked Questions

PlainEmissions reconciles four independent global greenhouse-gas data sources: EU EDGAR (Joint Research Centre), the World Bank Climate Knowledge Portal, Climate TRACE, and UNFCCC national inventory submissions. We cover per-country, per-sector, per-year emissions across all major greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O, F-gases) from 1970 onward where coverage permits.

EDGAR refreshes annually (typically Q3-Q4). The World Bank refreshes monthly. Climate TRACE updates quarterly. UNFCCC updates rolling, country-by-country. We refresh our database within four weeks of any major upstream release; methodology page tracks current vintage.

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. World Bank aggregates from multiple feeds. Disagreement is informative — it surfaces methodological uncertainty single-source dashboards hide. Country pages show the full spread.

Land use, land-use change, and forestry is the most-disputed sector across all four sources — disagreement can exceed 50% for some countries. We render LULUCF separately rather than rolling it into national totals so users see the uncertainty rather than 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.