EF 3.1

EF 3.1 combines characterisation factors for PEF’s 16 impact categories and around 4,400 life cycle inventory datasets, including more than 800 sector-specific datasets, developed under European Commission mandate and hosted on JRC’s European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment. Commercial suppliers delivering these datasets (ecoinvent, Sphera, Blonk, Quantis) retain intellectual property and signed 5-year availability agreements. These contracts ended on 31 December 2025: the database is no longer available for new studies. EF 3.1’s scientific robustness is not in question; this is a contractual effect. In June 2026, the Commission published guidance allowing transitional use of commercial databases, with one central principle: one dataset per use identified by the PEFCR, to avoid two companies in the same sector calculating the same impact using databases with divergent allocation, end-of-life and electricity-mix assumptions. Apparel & footwear PEFCR v3.1 published the first operational mapping. EF 4 is expected in the first quarter of 2028, with governance under which the Commission would hold intellectual property for core datasets. JRC also rates the robustness of human toxicity, freshwater ecotoxicity and mineral resource indicators as limited in EF 3.1.