An emission factor converts an activity — kilowatt-hours, litres, kilometres — into a quantity of greenhouse gas. Use the wrong one and every number downstream is wrong, cleanly and invisibly.
You cannot measure carbon dioxide leaving a building. What you can measure is the activity that produced it — kilowatt-hours drawn, litres burned, kilometres driven — and then convert. The conversion rate is the emission factor.
That makes the factor the most consequential single input in your entire disclosure. Your activity data can be perfect and your arithmetic flawless, and if the factor is wrong the answer is wrong by exactly the proportion the factor is wrong by. Worse, the error is invisible: the calculation looks clean, the figure looks plausible, and nobody notices until someone with local knowledge reads the report.
This is the mechanism by which a global platform quietly produces a wrong Nigerian number. Not through bad software — through a factor set built for a different grid.
We do not publish factor values on these pages
Deliberately. Published factors are revised, they differ between sources, and a value quoted on a marketing site gets copied into a disclosure and cited back to us. What these pages give you is what each factor represents, what drives it, how to choose between options, and where the current published value actually lives. Emvert maintains the values inside the platform with their source and version recorded against every calculation.
What it represents, and what moves it.
When a regional factor beats the national average.
The largest Scope 1 source on most Nigerian sites.
Fuel-based and distance-based approaches.
Combustion efficiency and methane.
A supplier-specific factor beats a regional one, which beats a national one, which beats an international default. But specificity has to be earned by data quality — a regional factor derived from thin data is worse than a robust national average.
Not afterwards. The question ‘which version of this factor produced this 2027 figure’ has to be answerable in 2030, when the factor has been revised twice.
Two sites in the same region on two different factors makes your total uninterpretable and invites exactly the scrutiny you want to avoid.
Converting methane and nitrous oxide into CO₂ equivalent requires GWP values, and those differ between IPCC assessment reports. State which set you used and where it came from.
When a published factor is revised, do you restate prior years or leave them on the version they used? Both are defensible. Deciding in advance is what makes either one defensible.
Published factors change. Grid factors move as the generation mix changes and as measurement improves. Fuel factors are updated as inventories are refined. This is normal and expected, and it creates a specific problem for anyone reporting year on year.
If a factor is revised downward and you silently apply the new value to your current year while your comparative sits on the old one, your disclosure shows a reduction that did not happen. That is a misstatement, and it is the most common unintentional one in emissions reporting.
The two defensible responses are to restate the comparative on the new factor and disclose the restatement, or to leave prior years on the factors they used and disclose the discontinuity. Emvert records the factor and version against every calculation specifically so that either option remains open — and so that a figure filed in one year cannot be silently rewritten by a revision in the next.
These are the authorities. Where a figure matters, take it from here rather than from any summary — including ours.
The underlying source for fuel combustion factors, process emissions and much else. Volume 2 covers energy.
The GWP values used to convert methane and nitrous oxide to CO₂ equivalent. State which assessment you used.
Generation and market data underlying Nigerian grid factor calculations.
Country-level electricity emission factors, widely used where a national publication is unavailable.
Sector and cross-sector calculation tools with documented factor sources.
Four questions, and you get the year you first file, the framework, and what to collect first.
Plain-language explainers of the FRC and SEC rules, ISSB S1 & S2, and what each asks you to disclose.
What a consultant-led reporting cycle costs against an annual licence, in Naira.
