By Mads Sejer Nielsen and Susanne Clement Justesen, AAU Communication and Public Affairs. Photo: Mette Eggert Dahl Olander and Anna Mathilde Erlang Dahlmann

It will now be easier to understand the CO2 impact, for example, from construction with a new free tool that can calculate the climate footprint of different materials from wood and cement to pears and bananas.

The tool, the BONSAI Climate Footprint Analyser, was presented at AAU in Copenhagen on 26 June. Lars Aagaard, Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities took part in the event.  

According to Professor Jannick Schmidt who is leading the project, climate data for products is highly misleading, opaque, outdated and behind paywalls. This is problematic as product climate data is important for being able to say something qualified about what the emissions of different products, companies and the general public are. 

Publicly accessible 

Therefore, Aalborg University, in collaboration with 2-0 LCA, Leiden University and CICERO Centre for International Climate Research, has developed a climate footprint calculator that pulls data from publicly available statistics from all over the world and shows CO2e emissions for over 1,000 products from more than 40 countries. The new calculator makes it easier to obtain up-to-date, detailed, globally complete, valid and reliable data. 

Jannick Schmidt says that data on CO2e emissions can be quite expensive to access, and in many cases, it is not possible to check where the figures come from and whether there are errors in the underlying calculations and data. At the same time, the results rarely take into account the overall system – for example, how all production processes in the world are connected, and that in principle nothing should be left out of a calculation. This means that it can be difficult to compare one number with another. The new database includes the full system, and the code is published so that people can examine it in detail. 

User involvement

"In the past, we have spent oceans of time updating our data, for example, from one year to another, because everything had to be done manually. Now, we can more so click a button and retrieve the latest numbers. We’ll never achieve 100 percent, but we’ve made an extraordinary effort. There will certainly be things that can be done better and that should be corrected. So we also hope that users will help to further develop the code and the calculations underlying it, and we ourselves will start in again immediately after the summer holidays," says Jannick Schmidt. 

The carbon footprint calculator is not limited to assessing the carbon footprint of all types of products, services and disposal processes; it can also calculate the consumption-based CO2e emissions per person in all countries.

Updating the data and website

Over the summer, the data and website will be updated regularly. In the meantime, there may be irregularities in results and functionality.

Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication and Public Affairs