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A comparison of carbon footprint results of the ecoinvent and EXIOBASE databases

The code and data presented in this repository was used to compare carbon footprints (CF) calculated with the ecoinvent 3.4 cutoff and the hybrid version of EXIOBASE (v3.3.18).

The main steps in this comparison include:

  1. The matching of products in ecoinvent to product groups in EXIOBASE, based on a matching of:
  • products
  • processes (for electricity)
  • geographies
  • units
  1. The comparison of the carbon footprints of matched products, using a number of metrics, e.g.
  • relative deviation
  • coefficient of variation
  • correlations

Specific analysis are included for specific sectors, such as the power sector.

This is followed by a discussion of

  • the sectoral coverage of both databases
  • the comparison of CFs
  • implications for database improvement
  • reasons for differences
  • limitations

Scientific paper

Zenodo DOI

LINK WILL BE ADDED AS SOON AS IT IS PUBLISHED

A quick guide to code and data

The code is split into 4 jpuyter notebooks:

  1. A - Preparation of ecoinvent data.ipynb: due to licensing reasons it is not possible to provide the ecoinvent carbon footprint results openly on this repository. This notebook calculates the carbon footprints for all products in the ecoinvent database based on the IPCC 2013 (GWP100a) method, with characterization factors matching between ecoinvent and EXIOBASE. The LCA results are then appended to the ecoinvent Activity Overview file for a use in the subsequent jupyter notebooks.
  2. B - Matching.ipynb: this notebook does the matching of ecoinvent products with EXIOBASE products (typically representing product groups) based on product, process, geography and unit matching. The matching was done mostly manually and the data can be found under data/matching.

The notebook builds upon the following data:

  • ecoinvent metadata on products/processes/geographies/units found in the activity_overview_3.4_cut-off_LCIA_results.xlsx in data/ecoinvent (this file can be generated from the first notebook by anyone with an ecoinvent license)
  • EXIOBASE metadata on product groups/geographies/units found in the hiot_results_PTM_v2.xlsx in data/EXIOBASE
  • Matching data that describes the matching of ecoinvent products, processes and geographies to EXIOBASE equivalents as specified in Matching file.xlsx in data/matching; additionally this folder contains a matching of ISIC codes to EXIOBASE in the file ISIC.xlsx

Main output: While the notebook generates a bunch of intermediate files (that can be found in the folder results/2019-12-02_WW, e.g. in matching), the main output is really EItoEX_matching_results_HIOT_manual.xlsx in results/2019-12-02_WW/matching_results. This file contains the matched carbon footprint results for all matched products between ecoinvent and EXIOBASE and useful metadata for filtering and further analysis. Virtually all of the analysis in the following notebooks is based on this file. Due to ecoinvent licensing reasons, we do not provide the file here, but it will be generated by the code.

  1. C - Analysis.ipynb: this notebook contains basically all analysis presented in the paper. The figures are saved to results/2019-12-02_WW/figures.

  2. D - Economic coverage.ipynb: this notebook produces the data for the economic/sectoral coverage of both databases (Table 1 in the article).

License

The following licenses apply:

  • for the code on this repository: the GNU General Public License Version 3 (see license file)
  • for the data produced by the code on this repository: the CC-BY 4.0 license (see license file)
  • for the underlying ecoinvent and EXIOBASE data used by the code on this repository: this data is subject to the licenses of the respective databases (see https://ecoinvent.org/ and https://www.EXIOBASE.eu/).