A determining element of your balance sheet, the emission factor (EF) plays a significant role in understanding how your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are calculated.
Let us start with the definition from Ademe:
"An emission factor is a ratio that allows us to know the greenhouse gas emissions related to an object, a material, or a service."
Its role is therefore to determine the amount of CO2 generated by your organisation's activities. It will allow you to convert your data into GHG emissions. Each piece of data in your balance must correspond to an EF in order to determine the GHG emissions of that data in question.
As part of a carbon balance, the emission factors take into account the life cycle of goods or services, and the results are converted into CO2 equivalent.
There are several databases integrated directly into the Toovalu Impact tool, the best-known being that of ADEME.
Updates to the ADEME Carbon Base® are made automatically in Toovalu as soon as a new version becomes available.
In the tool, the EFs are mostly present in the Admin section (red banner).
Pilots have the option to create emission factors specific to their organisation 👉 "How to create your own emission factors?"
When creating/modifying a piece of data, you need to specify the corresponding emission factor.
On the Collector side (green banner), the presence of emission factors can be found in the collection table.
You have 2 columns that specify the name of the EF associated with the data and another that gives the corresponding percentage of uncertainty for that EF.
The percentage of uncertainty of the EF is used to calculate the percentage of uncertainty of the data and consequently the uncertainty of your balance by adding up all uncertainties given 👉 "How is the final uncertainty calculated?"