Emissions Guides
Plain-language guides for researchers, journalists, ESG analysts, and curious readers — no climate jargon, no advocacy, just the data and how to read it.
Understanding CO2-Equivalent and GWP100
Plain-language explainer of how methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases are converted to a common CO2-equivalent unit using IPCC AR6 100-year global-warming potentials — and why GWP20 gives very different answers for short-lived gases.
Why EDGAR and UNFCCC Disagree on the Same Country
Side-by-side comparison of the EU EDGAR bottom-up model and UNFCCC self-reported national inventories. Why methodology disagreement is informative rather than embarrassing — and how to read both numbers.
LULUCF: The Most Disputed Emissions Sector
Land use, land-use change, and forestry is the only sector where disagreement among the four sources regularly exceeds 50% for some countries. Why, and how PlainEmissions presents the spread rather than picking one number.
Climate TRACE: Satellite-Derived Emissions Estimates
What Climate TRACE actually measures, how machine learning fills the gaps between sparse satellite observations, and why facility-level resolution is changing the inventory-verification game.
How to Read an Emissions Time Series Without Being Misled
Per-capita vs absolute; consumption-based vs production-based; trade-adjusted; LULUCF-included vs LULUCF-excluded. Six framing choices that determine whether a country looks like a leader or a laggard.
IPCC Sector Taxonomy in Plain Language
A walk-through of the eight high-level IPCC sectors (Energy, Transport, Buildings, Industry, Agriculture, LULUCF, Waste, Fugitive), what each one covers, and how this site maps every upstream sub-sector into the canonical hierarchy.
Using PlainEmissions Data for Research and Reporting
Citation conventions, license-attribution requirements, how to programmatically pull data, and the methodological caveats every journalist, researcher, or ESG analyst should disclose alongside the numbers.