ADEME Full Carbon Base in English — v17.0

The Carbon Base is a public database, managed by ADEME, of emission factors necessary for carrying out carbon accounting exercises. (An emission factor is a ratio of greenhouse gas emissions related to an object, material, or service). ADEME gives the following description on its [site](http://www.bilans-ges.ademe.fr/fr/accueil/contenu/index/page/presentation/siGras/0): > Today, it is the reference database of Article 75 of the Grenelle II Act and is fully consistent with Article L1341-3 of the Transport Code and the default values of the European Emissions Trading System. > Administered by ADEME, its governance is multi-stakeholder: 14 members make up it such as the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition (MTES), the Mouvement des entreprises de France (MEDEF), the Climate Action Network (RAC), the Association of Professionals in Climate Council (APCC), etc. Its enrichment is open to all through the possibility of external contributions. ### Access to the official base The legal framework is as follows: Article L312-1-1** of the Code of Relations between the Public and Administration (CRPA) stipulates that administrations are obliged to publish online “*data, regularly updated, whose publication is of economic, social, health or environmental interest*”. * Article D323-2-1** of the RCAP states that, if the administration wishes to restrict the possible re-use of the data, it may choose one of the following licenses: “Open License” or “Open Database License”. If it wishes to impose another licence, it must be the subject of prior approval (Article D323-2-2). * Article L300-4** of the CRPA adds that the data must be published “in an open standard, easily reusable and usable by an automated processing system*”. Until 28 May 2020, the “Base Carbone” files could only be viewed online one by one (after creating a user account). This did not allow automated processing. The complete download of the database was restricted (subject to the supply of a Kbis and the signing of a licence not approved within the meaning of Article D323-2-2). The ADEME offered free download, under the Open License, only one [extract of 858 lines (version 14.0)](https://data.ademe.fr/datasets/ademe-extrait-base-carbone-v14-0). This extract represented only 6 % of the base, and was not up to date with the latest version. Since 28 May 2020, ADEME has been broadcasting [Base Carbone v18.0](https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/base-carbone-r-v18-0/) on the same site, in trilingual version and with v18.0 data, without requiring the creation of a user account or the signing of a specific license. Unfortunately, the license chosen is not indicated on this page. **It is nevertheless from this dataset that we have to leave for any new analysis.** ### Description of the proposed game Here we keep a work of artisan consolidation of the complete base, which was useful before the publication by ADEME dated May 28, 2020 of the database in *open data*: * the game is distributed in two formats: * a format **XLSX**, for easy opening in Excel, for the general public, * a format **CSV**, with encoding **UTF-8**, separator **virgul**, for automated use in a standard format, for computer scientists, * the data are those of the **version 17.0** (14 November 2019) which is therefore no longer the latest version, * column names are chosen from the official extract from the Carbon Base proposed for download, * only fields in French are taken up, saving time, * the “Element Type” field is not completed because it does not understand its definition. ### Documentation The best available documentation is the one written and disseminated by ADEME, for example from the [User Manual](http://www.bilans-ges.ademe.fr/fr/accueil/contenu/index/page/decouverte/siGras/1) page of the official website. Reading this excellent documentation is essential to fully understand the meaning of the data. In addition, the official website contains additional information on how to calculate emission factors.