Regioinvent v1.3

The version 1.3 comes with a lot of improvements and big changes!

Non-internationally traded commodities are now regionalized.
In the previous versions, only international traded commodities were regionalized which left a fair amount of non regionalized processes within regioinvent as a result. For example, there was still "chemical factory, organics | GLO" everywhere or "metal working | RoW". Now these processes are regionalized and connected to regioinvent as well. Of course, not all of these processes can be regionalized as that would explode the size of the database. So only the most relevant of these processes were regionalized. To see how these relevant processes were identified, refer to the correspoding methodology section https://github.com/CIRAIG/Regioinvent/blob/master/Methodology.md#selection-of-commodities-to-regionalize.

Real production volume data.
Regioinvent so far only relied on rough estimates through the EXIOBASE MRIO database to get all domestic production data. If you have read the methodology, you know that this is extremely limited but is the best we can do without access to the real production volumes. However, there are some real production volumes available. Now the regioinvent code and database structure allow for the integration of these real production volumes. For this first implemention, we integrated the data from FAOSTAT, providing national production volumes for 101 commodities of regioinvent, mostly agriculture-related commodities. We also integrated data from USGS and BGS, which provides national production volumes for 56 commodities of regioinvent, on minerals and metals. This means that out of the current ~2000 commodities covered in regioinvent, 157 of them have real production volume data, i.e., ~7.5%. In the future we will try to integrate more and more read production volume data, but these have extremely limited availabilities.

Re-exports shenanigans.
Data from BACI (through the UN COMTRADE) does not differentiate between exports and re-exports. This is an issue as you would end up with inaccuracies, such as the Netherlands being the 7th exporter of bananas worldwide. Of course the Netherlands do not grow bananas, they are simply buying and re-exporting to other European countries. To deal with this issue, we now rely on net-exports instead of exports. Net-exports are simply exports minus imports. Hence, if the country ends up with a negative net-exports balance, it is likely they are doing a lot of re-exports. Countries with a positive net-exports balance are, for sure, actual producers and exporters of the commodity. A result of this change from exports to re-exports is the correction of import values as well. To follow up in the previous example, if France purchased bananas from the Netherlands, and that now we consider that the Netherlands are not actually exporting bananas, bananas purchased by France must come from elsewhere. We thus connect imports to the 5 biggest exporters of the commodities. So for bananas purchased by France from the Netherlands, bananas would actually come from Guatemala, Ecuador, etc., i.e. the biggest exporters worldwide.

Other minor changes.

• Moved from EXIOBASE v3.8.2 to EXIOBASE v3.9.5 to estimate the ratios domestic production/exports
• Water processes are now regionalized through the non-internationally traded commodities approach. As a result, they do not appear within the "ecoinvent3.X_regionalized"database anymore, but are contained within the regioinvent database.
• Aggregated processes (S) of ecoinvent were being spatialized, which made no sense.
• Correct mistakes within the regionalized ReCiPe method.
• Correct a mapping mistake for rice
• All trade data is now pre-treated outside of the regioinvent code and is provided directly in the SQL database.

Regioinvent v1.2.2

Added new regionalized LCIA methods:

• EF v3.1 (thanks to @matthieu-str)
• ReCiPe 2016 v1.03 (H)

Regioinvent v1.2.1

Added more commodities to the list of regionalized products.

Regioinvent v1.2

• Now works with ecoinvent3.9.1 AND ecoinvent3.10
• Uses BACI database instead of UN COMTRADE now. BACI is still based on COMTRADE but corrects inconsistencies in the data which we do not have to do anymore.
• Mapping between ecoinvent and HS codes redone. The previous mapping based on what ecoinvent directly provided had a lot of mistakes in it.
• Switched from IW+ v2.0.1 to IW+ v2.1. So there is a new regionalized impact category now: Particulate matter formation. + all the corrections brought in the v2.1 of IW+ which you can see here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14041258
• Refactoring of the code for spatialization which will make it easier in the future to add other LCIA methods than IW+
• Recalculation of the production volume estimates with EXIOBASE. Previously the Z matrix was used, instead of using the x matrix to also include final demand in the ratio.
• Added detailed methodology description

Regioinvent v1.1.4

Just changed the name of "global production markets" to global export markets" as the data used only covers export data and not domestic production data.

Regioinvent v1.1.3

Corrected mistake in regionalization of irrigation technosphere inputs for commodities using the technosphere inputs "market group for irrigation".

Changed terminology from biosphere_regionalized to biosphere_spatialized.

Regioinvent 1.1.2

Corrected problem where RoW geography was missing in impact categories such as land and acidification/eutrophication. It resulted in a null characterization factor instead of a global factor.

Regioinvent v1.1.1

Correction of mistakes in mapping of land regionalized flows with their characterization factors.

Regioinvent v1.1

New

Water processes were created to fix the water unbalance created from regionalizing and from the base ecoinvent database. The issue at hand was that, e.g., the production of apple in Chile was using an RoW irrigation, and so was using "RoW" water and not Chilian water, hence the unbalance.

In addition, these created water processes were regionalized (electricity, heat and waste inputs)

Finally, the data from the UN COMTRADE was refined to correct blatant mistakes and unit issues. The format of the file changed and the code was adapted to it.

v1.0.1

New

Ecoinvent processes are now relinked to created regioinvent processes.
For instance, the production of electricity from hard coal in Canada now uses the consumption market of hard coal in Canada as an input.