Carbon emissions

Here’s some clever science stuff, and details about how we work out the emissions for all of your lovely journeys.

This page explains how we calculate the carbon emissions that are displayed for journeys in Loco2’s journey planning tool.

When a journey is created, we send details of the mode of transport and the distance travelled to AMEE, who offer a web-based service for calculating the footprint of different activities. AMEE is the engine behind reputable carbon calculators such as the UK Government’s Act on CO2 tool and it holds lots of data for calcuating emissions of different activities. All of the data is checked by a team of qualified scientists, with the sources clearly identifiable.

At the moment, the calculations used for Loco2 are pretty basic, with one emissions factor per passenger per kilometer for each mode of transport (as outlined below). The benefit of using AMEE is that we can increase the accuracy over time so that as well as having emisson factors for different modes of transport, we can also take into account the geographical region that a journey takes place in, and the typical occupancy of trains, coaches and ferries on different routes.

The emissions factors we currently use are the ones published by the UK Department for the Environment in their Company Reporting Guidelines (PDF) (see Annex 6 of the report). At present we have decided to use the ‘National’ train type for calculating international journeys. This is because the ‘International’ factor is deceptively low due to the fact that it refers to Eurostar journeys, which predominantly run on electric trains using power generated in France. Most electricity in other European countries and beyond have a higher carbon intensity, because of a greater reliance and coal and gas as opposed to nuclear power stations in France.

We are currently working to make our carbon calculations more sophisticated by further collaboration with AMEE. Watch this space…

Currently used emissions factors for each mode of transport

Train: 0.0577 kg CO2 per passenger km

Bus/coach: 0.0300 kg CO2 per passenger km

Ferry: 0.1152 kg CO2 per passenger km

 

 

Photos: ansik (thumbnail)