Carbon Compute calculates the CO₂e of business travel flight by flight: the route actually flown, the aircraft that flew it, its cabin and how full it was. The method was developed at KTH and published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Distance-based calculators give every flight on a route the same figure. Carbon Compute calculates the flight that actually departed. Five things decide the difference, and each one alone can move the result this much:
A Boeing 737-800 is flown with 162 seats in a two-class layout or 189 all-economy. Same fuel, fewer seats to share it.
Low-cost carriers report 84–93 % occupancy; other airlines 76–83 %. Emissions per passenger follow the inverse.
Contrails only form above ~8 000 m. A short turboprop flight gets no uplift; a long-haul jet approaches ×1.9.
Detours around no-fly zones, weather and congestion. We use the flown track, not the straight line.
Fuel burn per kilometre differs between types and engine generations. We use the EEA figures for the aircraft that operated the flight.
Read the full explanation →Sources: Schennings, Larsson & Robèrt (2019); Carbon Compute method description.
Our database covers current and historical flights worldwide. For each one we match the aircraft, the operator’s cabin layout and occupancy, and the distance actually flown, then apply the published formula. The result is a figure for that flight, not for an average one.
The algorithm behind Carbon Compute was developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in 2019 in the peer-reviewed journal Sustainable Environment Research. The paper is open access, so anyone can read exactly how we calculate.
Development and implementation of an emission optimization model for passenger flight bookings
Carbon Wiz shows your organisation’s travel emissions by route, department and trend, against your carbon budget. Drag action cards onto next year’s plan to see what a travel policy would do before you adopt it.
Business travel is scope 3, category 6 under the GHG Protocol, and one of the few categories where exact data exists for every event. We calculate each flight so the figure is reproducible, not estimated.
Per-flight, per-passenger CO₂e that aggregates directly into the business-travel category.
Flight-level data and a stated method give the audit trail that limited assurance asks for.
Versioned factors and a documented height factor, so year-on-year changes reflect your travel, not the method.
Reported with the altitude-dependent factor, and CO₂-only alongside for frameworks that count greenhouse gases only.
The algorithm was developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and first implemented in 2016 on Sweden’s largest flight comparison site, where it ranked flights by emissions for every search.
Aviation warms the climate through more than CO₂. What contrails do, why the science is uncertain, and how Carbon Compute applies the height factor.
Read more →Business travel is scope 3, category 6. A practical guide to the three ways of calculating it, what an auditor will ask for, and the data you need to keep.
Read more →Two calculators, one trip, two very different numbers. The five things that decide a flight's emissions, and how common calculation methods treat them.
Read more →We would be happy to show how Carbon Compute can help your organisation measure and reduce its emissions.