Which greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions do various vehicle categories cause and how high are a country’s average road traffic emissions? The Handbook Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA) that INFRAS developed provides answers and data.
Which greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions do various vehicle categories – for example a Euro 6 Emission Standard diesel car, an electric car, or a 40-ton truck – emit per kilometer in various traffic situations? How high are the average emissions of a country’s aggregate vehicle fleet in a specific year? This information is required in many contexts – for example for calculating national climate goals, for improving air quality in cities and states or for environmental impact assessments in infrastructure projects.
An overview of HBEFA contents
The Handbook Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA) that INFRAS developed provides regularly updated emission data for all common vehicle categories. Its contents include
- Specific emissions in g/km for various vehicle categories: passenger cars, delivery trucks, heavy commercial vehicles, busses, and motorcycles.
- A broad selection of traffic situations, technologies and emission standards.
- All regulated air pollutants subject to emission legislation as well as the most important unregulated pollutants, energy usage, fuel usage, and greenhouse gas emissions of road traffic.
- Traffic data for six European countries (CH, DE, AT, FR, NO, SE).
- Time period: from the 1990s to approximately 2050 (depending on the country).
Standard data source for pollution reporting or climate balances, for example
The Handbook Emission Factors (HBEFA) is a standardized data source for emission factors. It is used for greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions reporting, air quality analyses, environmental impact assessments, emission inventories or corporate carbon accounting. Moreover, the handbook serves as an input for other emission calculation tools such as COPERT, TREMOD, or EcoTransIT.
INFRAS continuously develops and coordinates HBEFA
Since its inception in the 1990s, INFRAS has been developing the Handbook Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA), overseeing the continuous development of methodologies, and coordinating the regular updating of content contributions from the involved development partners. These include, among others, the Technical University of Graz (Austria), The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IFEU) Heidelberg (Germany), the Swedish environmental research institute IVL, and the Université Gustave Eiffel, WSP (Sweden). The development of the HBEFA is funded by the national traffic or environmental agencies of six European nations – Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, Sweden, and Norway.
Further information and contact
You will find all information about the Handbook Emission Factors as well as IT applications on the webpage www.hbefa.net. INFRAS is the contact point with regard to content and or for technical support.
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