By Kim Ratchke, Jesper Pøhler & Mads Sejer Nielsen, AAU Communication and Public Affairs

A newly developed calculator helps users understand the climate footprint of materials ranging from wood and cement to pears and bananas.

The BONSAI Climate Footprint Analyser, developed at Aalborg University, enables users to examine the CO₂ impact of construction materials, consumer products, and multiple other sectors through a free, publicly accessible platform.

The underlying database is based on life cycle assessments (LCA) and allows authorities, companies and other actors to quantify emissions from specific products and activities.

“Currently, available climate data for products is often misleading, untransparent, outdated, or hidden behind paywalls. Yet such data is crucial for understanding the actual emissions from different products. That’s why we hope our tool will help users identify better climate solutions,”
says Professor Jannick Schmidt from the Department of Sustainability and Planning at Aalborg University.

Professor Schmidt has led the development of the analyser, which draws on publicly available data sources from around the world and provides CO₂e values for more than 1,000 products across over 40 countries.

The tool and its database have been developed in collaboration with 2.-0 LCA, Leiden University, and the CICERO Center for Climate Research, with funding from the KR Foundation.

Closing the data gap

Until now, the lack of updated, detailed, globally consistent and credible data has been a major obstacle to climate footprint assessments. The BONSAI team is working to solve that.

“Access to reliable CO₂e emissions data can be expensive, and in many cases, it’s impossible to validate the sources or check the background calculations. In addition, existing results often fail to consider the full global system – how production processes are interconnected and how nothing should be left out of a proper calculation. Our database includes the full system, and we publish all the code as open source, so that others can examine and improve it,”
explains Jannick Schmidt.

Open, automated and evolving

The analyser’s infrastructure is designed to automatically pull the latest data from available sources, unlike many LCA calculators where datasets – from fish to steel – are manually updated.

Unlike other models, the BONSAI tool is both freely available and open source – meaning that both the source code and the underlying databases are publicly accessible.

“Previously, we spent countless hours manually updating the data from one year to the next. Now, we can usually just click a button and retrieve the newest data,”
says Jannick Schmidt, adding:
“That said, we will never be completely done. We've made a huge effort, but there will always be things that can – and should – be improved. That’s why we hope users will explore the BONSAI database and contribute to further developing the code.”

The analyser can be used to assess the carbon footprint of all kinds of products, services, and waste processes. It also includes consumption-based CO₂e emissions per person for all countries covered in the database.

The BONSAI database was officially launched on 26 July at Aalborg University campus, with participation from Denmark’s Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, Lars Aagaard, among others.