Scope 3 emission factors
Spend-based Scope 3 emission factors created for businesses, covering 79 countries.
Ready to use for an audit-ready Scope 3 report for your organisation.
Built for business carbon accounting, our spend-based emission factors provide a transparent, practical foundation for complete Scope 3 reporting. Ready to use directly with your spend data without any manipulation, backed by clear documentation and methodology, and with expert support included.
Our spend-based factors form one part of our Total Carbon approach, allowing spend-based estimates to be complemented with activity data, supplier-specific data and product carbon footprints in a consistent and comparable way.
“If you want to include everything in your supply chain analysis, you must start with a spend-based foundation. Only after that can you increase accuracy by carefully using activity and product data.”
Prof Mike Berners-Lee, founder Small World Consulting.
You can use our emission factors for:
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Your initial full spend-based footprint before you substitute in more specificity.
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Scope 3.1 Purchased Goods and Services and 3.2 Capital Goods footprinting.
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Consistent reporting across multiple countries.
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Consistent reporting year-on-year, including re-baselining.
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Scope 3 reporting aligned with IFRS S2 / UK SRS S2 requirements.
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Best practice hybridisation of activity data and product carbon footprints in a comparable way, following our Total Carbon approach.
Easy to use, with our full support:
Built specifically for business carbon accounting from day one, as used by Small World Consulting in our own carbon accounting services.
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Ready to use, transparent and up-to-date business ready Scope 3 emission factors.
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2025 factors available now with regular releases of the latest data included in all licences.
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Data licences include support from the Small World Consulting accounting experts, and clear documentation to help you follow best-practice in your carbon footprinting.
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Fully transparent methodology and data sources, making it simple to get your footprint audit-ready.
“One key benefit of the SWC MRIO is being able to ask the team any queries about any of the emissions factors, and they can talk us through their methodology in detail, unlike other 'black box' datasets.”
Jane Hersey, Group Sustainability Reporting Manager, Savills.
Emission factors for every scenario:
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Time series from 2016 to 2025, with inflation-adjustments already calculated for you, allow for consistent baseline and current year reporting using the right data for each year.
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Different factors specific to country of supply or county of purchase, lets you refine your footprint depending on your supplier data.
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Scope 1, 2 and 3 breakdowns so you can easily estimate your tier 1 supply chain emissions, and substitute in supplier-specific footprint data.
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Factors in purchasers’ and basic prices to reflect the actual price you've paid and account for taxes as well as retail and transport margins.
79 countries
102 sectors
90,670 emission factors per year
Don't worry, we'll make finding the right one easy!
Comparison of emission factors:
Ours isn't the only MRIO database out there, but our model is specifically designed for the purposes of business carbon accounting. Several other MRIO datasets and their features are summarised below:
Correct as of June 2026 according to publicly available data.
Get the SWC MRIO Emission Factor dataset
Which dataset do you need?
How our clients use our datasets:
Our emission factors are trusted by carbon accounting platforms and finance software, by multinationals like BT Group and Savills, as well as SMEs and local councils. Our customers include:
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In-house sustainability teams – annual Scope 3 reporting, target setting and carbon modelling
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Procurement teams – analysing purchased goods and services and identifying decarbonisation opportunities
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Sustainability consultancies – delivering robust Scope 3 assessments for clients
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Carbon accounting software platforms – embedding transparent, business-ready emission factors into their products
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Financial services – estimating financed and customer emissions
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Universities and researchers – undertaking carbon accounting and sustainability research
And of course we use our SWC MRIO emission factors in our own best-practice carbon accounting with our Small World Consulting clients.
What is an MRIO or Multi-Regional Input-Output model?
Our dataset is an Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output, EE-MRIO. It's a method used to estimate the environmental impacts associated with economic activity across interconnected industries and countries.
It starts with national input-output models, which describe how industries supply goods and services to one another. Then it combines them across multiple countries using trade data to capture global supply chains.
Finally environmental data such as GHG emissions are added. You can use the model to trace the carbon footprint of products where they are consumed, rather than only looking at the impacts at the location they were made in.
If someone buys a product made in the UK, an EE-MRIO model can estimate not only the emissions from the local factory but also the emissions generated during the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transport, and other upstream stages around the world.
Because of this, EE-MRIO models are widely used for carbon footprinting, supply-chain analysis, and consumption-based environmental accounting.
