When reviewing or reporting on emissions data, you may need to link emissions to the business activities that produce them.
There are a number of ways to do this using the Plan A Sustainability Platform.
Export data
For a comprehensive overview of your emissions and the inputs used to calculate them (including both inputted business activity and instances where national averages have been used), export your data from the Report emissions page. To find particular data points, you can download the report for a given time period and filter by emissions location or facility.
This method allows you to see all relevant data in a single file, whilst allowing you to aggregate data over a period or across locations easily using spreadsheet functions.
This option is best for aggregating emissions data and business activity for reporting framework submissions, in-depth analysis for decarbonisation planning, and reviewing or troubleshooting emissions data.
Collect and Update page
To review the data you have uploaded within the platform, navigate to the relevant category's 'Upload history' page. To do this, navigate to Collect & update data and click 'Update data' on the relevant category.
There you will find all uploaded files, and have the option to 'view' the data in-platform, where you can filter through uploaded files to find specific data points and manually edit them in-app if necessary.
If you wish to review and edit the file off-platform, you can download the file again, and 'replace' the file once you are happy with the data.
This option works best for quickly reviewing individual data points or making edits to business activity data.
Measure emissions dashboards
Finally, business activity is also visualised on the Measure emissions dashboards for most emissions categories, where charts present both granular breakdowns of business activities and changes in business activities over time.
This option is best for understanding the distribution of different types of business activity within a particular category and time period (e.g. business travel journeys made by flight vs train vs car) as well as seeing changes in business activities over time (and comparing these to emissions trends). This is particularly useful for identifying hotspots and understanding progress against mitigating them.
How can I find business activity values behind national averages?
For certain categories, we automatically enable national average activity values. These represent typical frequency or consumption values for various activities within a given territory, including electricity and heat consumption, waste generation, share of employees commuting per mode of transport, and remote working frequency.
Since this is data you don't upload, but is rather calculated automatically based on your Organisational data, you may be interested in knowing the assumed values (e.g. frequency or consumption) that are used to calculate emissions. This is viewable in both the Data export and the 'Measure emissions' dashboards.
In the Data export, the 'National average' column highlights rows of data for which national averages have been used with the value 'true'. The average business activity values are then listed alongside as usual.
On the Measure emissions page, business activity data in relevant charts also includes national average data in the same way as described above.
To be able to distinguish between primary and national average data, however, you should use the Data export.