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If you use spend-based emission factors to estimate your Scope 3 emissions, it may be time to update your calculations.
Today, the UK Government published the latest UK carbon footprint statistics, including the updated 2023 spend-based greenhouse gas emission multipliers used by thousands of organisations to estimate supply chain emissions. Source: UK carbon footprint statistics (2023)
While this may sound like a routine annual update, it can have a meaningful impact on your reported emissions. If you're using spend-based factors for Scope 3 reporting, your numbers may change even if your purchasing hasn't.
Each year, the UK Government doesn't simply add another year's worth of data.
Instead, the entire historical dataset is recalculated using the latest economic and energy data. That means the correct comparison isn't last year's published 2022 factors against the new 2023 factors. It's the restated 2022 values from today's release against the new 2023 values.
Compared on that like-for-like basis, the picture is remarkably consistent: most spend-based emission factors have decreased.
The reductions are widespread rather than dramatic.
Some sectors experienced particularly notable decreases, including:
Each of these fell by roughly 20% or more.
A smaller number of sectors moved in the opposite direction. The largest increases were seen in:
Across the 112 SIC sectors included in the dataset:
This broad downward movement is consistent with the UK's ongoing decarbonisation and improvements captured within the underlying input-output model. However, averages only tell part of the story.
Individual sectors changed by anywhere between around -28% and +60%, meaning organisations with spending concentrated in particular industries could see much larger changes to their reported footprint than the overall trend suggests.
Spend-based emission factors are the backbone of many organisations' Scope 3 reporting.
They're widely used to estimate emissions from Category 1: Purchased Goods and Services, particularly where supplier-specific emissions data isn't yet available. They also underpin many:
Because of that, using the latest factors matters for two reasons.
First, older factors can simply produce less accurate estimates.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, mixing different versions of the dataset can create misleading trends.
For example, if your 2022 baseline was calculated using last year's published factors but your 2023 footprint uses today's updated factors, part of the apparent year-on-year change may simply reflect a methodology update rather than a genuine reduction in emissions.
Without restating your baseline, it's easy to overstate (or understate) progress.
This is the kind of complexity that Climate Essentials manage behind the scenes.
Climate Essentials automatically applies the latest spend-based factors consistently across your inventory, records which dataset version every calculation uses, and restates historical baselines whenever Defra updates the methodology. That means your trend line reflects real changes in emissions, not changes in the underlying dataset.
And because spend-based estimates are only the starting point, we also help organisations improve accuracy over time by replacing estimates with supplier-specific emissions data where it matters most through Climate Essentials for Supply Chains.
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