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A consumption-based carbon accounting method that takes into account how national policy changes affect emissions redraws the global emissions map. National greenhouse-gas accounting should reflect how countries’ policies and behaviours affect global emissions. Actions that contribute to reduced global emissions should be credited, and actions that increase them should be penalized. This is essential if accounting is to serve as accurate guidance for climate policy. Yet this principle is not satisfied by the two most common accounting methods. Production-based accounting used under the Kyoto Protocol does not account for carbon leakage—the phenomenon of countries reducing their domestic emissions by shifting carbon-intensive production abroad 1 . Consumption-based accounting 2 , 3 (also called carbon footprinting) does not credit countries for cleaning up their export industries, and it also punishes some types of trade that could contribute to more carbon efficient production worldwide. We propose an improvement to consumption-based carbon accounting that takes technology differences in export sectors into account and thereby tends to more correctly reflect how national policy changes affect total global emissions. We also present empirical results showing how this new measure redraws the global emissions map.

An important prerequisite for accurately characterizing economic exposure from climate change at the national scale is a spatial inventory of economic activity and value creation. Current options for such inventories are limited, being either spatially precise but economically bounded sector-specific or owner-specific datasets, or gridded gross domestic product (GDP) products with coarse spatial resolution and inadequate sectoral resolution. To address these limitations, we develop a map of national GDP with high spatial and sectoral resolution. We stress this with meter-scale flood hazard maps to characterize GDP at risk from flooding. We further couple this to a macroeconomic input–output analysis to use the new sectoral resolution to estimate the scope of indirect economic exposure to flood at a national scale.

The environmental and social consequences of clearing tropical forests for palm oil and soybean monoculture have been analyzed in a number of studies and are widely recognized. Some initiatives and studies have examined portions of the supply chain from the perspective of individual companies and stages in the supply chain. We complement this work by providing a consistent, detailed, global trade-linked analysis of the four major vegetable oils, connecting land use for production and its biodiversity impact, through global supply chains, to final consumers. To this end, we develop a global model by fully integrating FAO's physical supply-utilization accounts into the environmentally extended multiregional input-output model EXIOBASE. Global supply chains are linked with the life-cycle impact assessment model LC-Impact to assess biodiversity impact of land use via global maps of oil crop cultivation. For the period 2000-2010, we find significant substitution of domestically produced oils with relatively low biodiversity impacts with Indonesian palm oil and Brazilian soybean oil for the major consuming countries, China, Europe and the US. Whereas soybean oil remains the vegetable oil with the largest impact on biodiversity at a global scale, biodiversity footprints of palm oil have grown substantially larger in the period 2000-2010, driven by demand from Europe and China. Our results suggest that demand-side policies focused on specific oils, such as palm oil, might lead to switching oils and unintended shifts of environmental impacts.

The UNFCCC requires the annual reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. These inventories focus on emissions within a territory, and do not capture the effect of emissions embodied in imports. Consumption based carbon accounting (CBCA) has been proposed as a complementary method to capture these emissions, and a number of global models have been developed to operationalise CBCA. However, discrepancies in country-level CBCA results occur, which can cause concern for the practical use of CBCA. Despite these quantitative difference in results, do they provide robust results when changes over time are investigated? Here we present results of all the major global models and normalise the model results by looking at changes over time relative to a common base year value. We give an analysis of the variability across the models, both before and after normalisation in order to give insights into variance at national and regional level. A dataset of harmonised results (based on means) and measures of dispersion is presented, providing a baseline dataset for CBCA validation and analysis.

Biodiversity footprinting links consumers to the biodiversity pressure their consumption induces, thereby informing choices and enabling participation in remediation measures. In order for countries, cities and households to reduce their impacts it is useful to know more precisely what the various drivers of their footprints are. Here we ask: do urban or rural areas in Europe exert higher biodiversity footprints? And how strongly coupled are income and biodiversity losses? Studying urban versus rural households at the country level in Europe, we found both have generally similar footprints, but that higher income households clearly drive higher footprints. We examined the role of selected socio-economic variables regarding biodiversity-related impacts associated with European household consumption in 2005 and 2010, asking: does urbanization alone drive higher biodiversity footprints, or what are the relative contributions of income and urbanity? We applied a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model, supplemented with data from consumer expenditure surveys and extended by life cycle impact assessment methodologies to account for biodiversity losses. We find that urbanization and higher income are important sources of higher absolute biodiversity footprints. On a per capita basis, results are mixed, though a slight trend of higher impacts from city residents in most countries, as well as a general positive correlation with income, can be observed. Also, while wealthy European countries are accountable for the largest species losses overall, it is the ones with a high gross domestic product per capita and those bordering the Mediterranean Sea that have the highest per capita biodiversity footprints. Additionally, most European countries and Europe as a whole are net importers of biodiversity losses, with land use generally being the dominating impact category.

Identifying species threat hotspots has been a successful approach for setting conservation priorities. One major challenge in conservation is that in many hotspots export industries continue to drive overexploitation. Conservation measures must consider not just the point of impact, but also the consumer demand that ultimately drives resource use. To understand which species threat hotspots are driven by which consumers, we have developed a new approach to link a set of biodiversity footprint accounts to the hotspots of threatened species on the IUCN Red List. The result is a map connecting global supply chains to impact locations. Connecting consumption to spatially explicit hotspots driven by production has not been done before on a global scale. Locating biodiversity threat hotspots driven by consumption of goods and services can help connect conservationists, consumers, companies, and governments in order to better target conservation actions.