CEDA (Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive)
Reviewed by Afonso Firmo, Co-Founder & Director · Updated 8 July 2026
Watershed's spend-based emission factor database: roughly 60,000 factors across 400 industries and 148 countries for scope 3 estimation.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Watershed (originally VitalMetrics)
- Geography
- Global — 148 countries + rest-of-world
- Methodology
- Spend-based
- Licence
- Open tier (free) + commercial tier
- Coverage
- Around 60,000 spend-based factors across 400 industries and 148 countries plus a rest-of-world region, spanning ~95% of global GDP
- Versions
- Maintained continuously; first developed in the early 2000s, acquired by Watershed in 2022
- Scale
- ~60,000 factors across 400 industries
Official Source & Citation
CEDA (Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive) is published by Watershed (originally VitalMetrics). Use the citation below when referencing factors drawn from it.
Citation: Watershed Technology, Inc. CEDA: Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive. Available at: https://watershed.com. Foundational methodology: Suh, S. (2005). Developing a sectoral environmental database for input-output analysis. Economic Systems Research, 17(4), 449–469.
CEDA answers the question every scope 3 lead eventually asks: “is there a spend-based database with more resolution than the open ones?” With roughly 60,000 factors across 400 industries and 148 countries, the Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive is the most finely resolved spend-based source in mainstream use — and since 2022 it has been maintained by Watershed.
What It Is
CEDA is an environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) database: it models the emissions embedded in economic activity, so that money spent with a given industry in a given country converts to estimated upstream emissions. It began as academic work by Dr Sangwon Suh — the foundational paper dates to 2005 — was commercialised through VitalMetrics, and is now published by Watershed in two tiers: a free Open CEDA and a commercial tier with scope breakdowns, constituent gas detail (CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, HFCs, PFCs, SF₆, NF₃) and FLAG classifications.
When to Use It
CEDA earns its place in scope 3 categories 1 and 2 — purchased goods, services and capital goods — where invoices are plentiful and activity data is scarce. Its 148-country resolution matters most for organisations with genuinely global supply chains: spend in Vietnam, Chile or Kenya maps to national intensities instead of a coarse rest-of-world average.
CEDA Compared to Other Spend-Based Sources
| Database | Publisher | Regions | Industries | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CEDA | Watershed | 148 + RoW | 400 | Open + commercial tiers |
| EXIOBASE 3 | EXIOBASE Consortium | 49 | 163 | CC BY-SA 4.0 (free) |
| USEEIO | US EPA | US only | 400+ | Public domain |
The practical trade-off: CEDA buys resolution, EXIOBASE buys openness. For a screening exercise either works; for a global inventory where specific countries matter, CEDA’s granularity shows.
Limitations to Keep in Mind
CEDA is still spend-based, and every spend-based caveat applies. Factors are sector averages, so switching to a greener supplier inside the same industry changes nothing in your numbers. Results move with prices, not physical reality. And the economic tables underneath lag the current year. Treat CEDA output as a map of where your scope 3 hotspots are — then replace the biggest categories with activity data, using sources like the NGA Factors for Australian operations, as your data matures. That screening-then-upgrading path is exactly how NetNada’s scope 3 workflow is built.