Update Summary
This update contains emission factors based on the latest available data, and price-adjusted to December 2024.
Overall Updates
We’ve made a number of updates to our emissions factors for Australia. The core spend factors - which we base on 2022 IELab data - have been inflation updated to December 2024. The 2022 IELab data showed a general decrease in emission intensities due to price inflation and ongoing decarbonisation of the Australian electricity network. However there were also increases in some emissions factors, primarily due to COVID19 rebound effects e.g. in transportation, tourism and education sectors.
Although inflation rates in Australia are flattening, an inflationary adjustment has still been made to align the spend based factors to prices within the Consumer Price Index for the October-December 2024 quarter. In most cases this reduced the emissions intensity per $ of most of the emissions factors, helping prevent inflation in the footprints where increased spend from higher prices would otherwise result in an assumption of greater consumption and thus emissions. Some notable exceptions which went against the inflationary trends and impacted some categories were a tobacco tax increase, insurance premium inflations, electricity price deflation, and gas price inflation.
Energy Categories
Our Energy Model has had a significant methodology upgrade to bring it in line with Cogo’s global approach in this area. One major change was switching from EEIO data to using a mix of activity and cost data to derive spend-based emissions factors. Another was switching to a location-based approach for electricity footprinting. In addition, the Energy Model now supports an aligned and efficient approach to footprinting energy for personal, small business, and financed emissions purposes. Additionally:
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Our Energy emissions factors are now derived based on activity data e.g. emissions per kWh, and cost data e.g. $/kWh, while still maintaining inclusion of the full combustion and supply chain scope necessary.
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The input data into the model has changed, but it is still in line with the scope we measure i.e. Scope 2 & ‘transmission and distribution losses’ approach to carbon footprinting for businesses. The energy model provides more accuracy and granularity for the different fuel sources.
This impacts on any spend categories that related to energy and utility footprinting.
Grocery and Food Speciality Categories
We have made some improvements which have impacted the emission intensity for grocery, and introduced specialty food retail categories.
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The model now uses product life cycle analysis (LCA) data collated by Poore & Nemecek, along with grocery cost data collated from supermarket websites primarily. This improves the accuracy of the model. All price data is inflation adjusted to Oct-Dec 2024 if necessary, to align with the overall update.
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The model now also includes various specialty food retail store types e.g butcher, fishmonger, greengrocer, which follow the standard grocery model methodology.
Overall there is a significant change to food-related categories. Our emissions factors have increased for most of the specialty food retail categories.
Clothing
The emission factor is now weighted based on the number of factory employees per country for the global brand used as the basis for the supply chain assumptions, rather than the number of clothing factories in use. Improvements were also made to the input emissions factor data; the model now uses input clothing emissions factors per country which can be updated on an annual basis. As a result, the emissions factor is lower than the previous version, which impacts on any categories for spend on clothing and footwear.
Industry Benchmarks
We have improved the alignment of our industry benchmark emissions factor categories with work done for other countries. This includes consolidation and revision of some categories, in turn leading to the emissions factors changing for some of these categories.