PANTHEON Project | Horizon Europe | Grant Agreement No. 101137905
Climate action runs on data. Before any government can set a credible emissions target, before any researcher can model a net-zero pathway, before any industrial sector can be held accountable for its carbon footprint, someone has to answer a deceptively difficult question: how much was actually emitted, where, by what, and when?
This is the challenge that PANTHEON’s newly delivered Inventory Estimation Platform (D1.2) has been built to address. Published in February 2026 as part of the project’s Work Package 1 — the construction of a global, high source-resolution greenhouse gas and pollutant emission accounting system — the platform represents a foundational step in the project’s broader ambition to map credible pathways towards carbon neutrality.
Turning Messy Activity Data into Consistent Emission Estimates
Anyone who has worked with real-world emissions data knows the problem: it comes from many different sources, uses inconsistent sector classifications, mixes technologies under the same label, and arrives in formats that resist direct comparison. Assembling a coherent picture from this diversity is painstaking work — and if the workflow is not transparent and reproducible, the resulting numbers are difficult to defend.
The Inventory Estimation Platform tackles this directly. Its core function is to convert diverse activity datasets — covering power generation, industry, transportation, agriculture, residential and commercial sectors, and natural sources — into a consistent, inventory-ready structure through a standardised process of filtering and sector mapping. Once mapped, the platform computes emissions by combining activity data with appropriate emission factors (EFs) drawn from dedicated databases, following the straightforward but powerful formula: Emission = Activity × EF.
The platform covers CO₂ alongside a full suite of short-lived air pollutants — NOₓ, SO₂, CO, black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC), brown carbon (BrC), PM₂.₅, PM₁₀, and total suspended particulates (TSP) — making it relevant not just for climate accounting but for air quality and health impact assessments as well.
What makes the platform technically distinctive is its interactive, rule-driven workflow. Rather than running as a black box that produces outputs users must accept on faith, it narrows the analytical scope step by step, keeping every filter choice, every sector alignment decision, and every factor assignment explicitly visible and auditable. The result is traceable emission estimates — numbers whose origins can be interrogated, verified, and reproduced.
Linking Activity, Emission Factors, and Technology in One Transparent Chain
The platform’s architecture reflects a more sophisticated understanding of what emissions accounting actually requires. Real-world emissions do not depend only on how much energy a sector consumed — they depend on how it was consumed: which fuels, which technologies, which vintages of equipment. A coal plant with modern scrubbers and a coal plant without them are very different in terms of their pollutant profiles, even if their activity levels are identical.
To capture this, the platform links activity data with emission factors and technology fractions in a single, traceable chain. Sector descriptors are mapped to standardised keys shared across both the activity and EF databases, and technology splits and fuel sub-categories are carried explicitly through every calculation step. The system supports activity-level adjustment using technology- and scenario-specific shares, meaning users can explore how changes in the technology mix — more electric vehicles, a faster coal phase-out, different fuel-switching rates — translate into different emission outcomes, all within the same consistent framework.
The platform’s three-column interface makes this logic visible: on the left, users define the scope (geography, sector, fuel, technology, time period, pollutant); in the middle, they select and preview the emission factors; on the right, the calculation executes and results are displayed. The interaction flow — filter, load, calculate, display — is designed to be both intuitive for users and fully auditable for reviewers. Outputs can be exported in common formats for downstream use.
A Practical Foundation for Scenario and Pathway Work
The Inventory Estimation Platform is not an end in itself. Its explicit purpose, stated clearly in the deliverable, is to serve as input for other work packages — and most directly to enable Task 1.3, PANTHEON’s planned net-zero carbon emission pathway assessment platform.
This connection is not incidental. Pathway assessment requires a credible, well-structured baseline: if you want to model what happens to emissions between now and 2050 under different technology transitions, you need a starting point that is sectorally disaggregated, technology-aware, and spatially resolved. Crucially, you need one whose sector and technology descriptors are maintained explicitly, rather than collapsed into aggregate numbers, so that future scenario work can manipulate individual components — phasing out a technology here, introducing a new one there — without having to reverse-engineer assumptions buried inside opaque historical estimates.
The platform is designed precisely with this downstream use in mind. By keeping sector, technology, control, and fuel descriptors explicit throughout the workflow and producing grid-level outputs, it preserves the structural detail that scenario modelling requires. The spatial allocation approach, documented separately, further supports integration with the spatially resolved outputs that PANTHEON’s atmospheric and health work packages depend on.
In this sense, D1.2 functions as infrastructure — less visible than the pathway analyses it will eventually support, but indispensable to their scientific credibility.
Open, Accessible, and Built for the Long Term
In line with FAIR data principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — the platform has been deposited in the Zenodo open-access repository within the PANTHEON Project community (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18804271), and the complete source code is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/YTY-web/Emission-Inventory-Platform. The platform is accessible via the PANTHEON website, free of charge, under standard HTTPS protocols.
This openness is deliberate. Scientific credibility in emissions accounting depends on the ability of the wider community to inspect, verify, and build upon the methods being used. By making both the code and the methodology fully accessible, PANTHEON invites scrutiny — and with it, the trust that serious climate science requires.
The platform is currently in an early but functional stage, with the core workflow in place and ongoing refinements focused on stability and coverage. As the project moves forward, it will grow in both scope and integration, eventually forming the quantitative backbone against which PANTHEON’s pathway and scenario outputs are assessed.
For access to the platform and further project outputs: www.pantheon-decarbonization.com
PANTHEON is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under Grant Agreement No. 101137905. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union.
